I think a lot of folks are having feelings about this line
>stuck paying someone else's mortgage.
What he meant was that when someone is not paying the rent, and you are evicting them, you are paying for the living expenses for a stranger who may holding your property hostage, who may be actively abusing the property, who may be deliberately prolonging the experience.
This does not feel good to pay out of your own pocket to shelter someone else's family for any amount of time. There is no recourse to recover the money. Your best outcome it to just get the property back as soon as possible, even if that means rewarding the bad tenant with more money. And in most places in the US now, evictions are not even possible due to virus lockdowns.
Not paying rent is theft. It hurts financially and emotionally when people steal from you.
And for the soft-hearted landlords who didn't screen properly, or took a chance on a sob-story, it was already months of slow-pay or no-pay before you started the eviction. Can you imagine someone stealing 4-6mo of living expenses from you?
Oh please, landlords are not employees working at the behest of their bosses, they are businesses that are in the business of selling a basic necessity of life: housing.
Compare these supposed woes to any contractor and their clients, and this sort of bellyaching would be just be laughed at. "Theft"!!! Come on.
Any landlord who thinks in these moral terms deserves to lose their shirt. It is a business!!!
And on top of that, it's not web design or some other sort of service. They are literally providing somebody's home. I have zero sympathy for any landlord that gets into such a business and then bellyaches about evicting somebody.
This is a cost of doing business. 4-6 months of rent should be cash on hand to deal with these sorts of things, and many (most? all?) mortgages for rental properties demand that you show you have that much cash before you can even get the mortgage. So even the banking industry is requiring these amateur landlords to learn basic biz before they can enter the game.
There's huge asymmetry here, landlords have lots of wealth, lots of flexibility, lots of recourse and backup plans, but their tenants often do not and often have no safety net whatsoever. If landlords start advocating for a basic social safety net, I may start to have sympathy. And some of their tenants might be deadbeats. But I've come across a tooooon of really shitty landlords, a few people that hit hard times that are doing their best to pay rent with their extremely limited means, and basically zero of the supposed deadbeat that landlords say are their perpetual problem.
> Compare these supposed woes to any contractor and their clients, and this sort of bellyaching would be just be laughed at. "Theft"!!! Come on.
I don't follow. The contractor isn't forced to work for months without pay against his will if the client stops paying.
> This is a cost of doing business. 4-6 months of rent
Losing 4-6 months of rent erases multiple years of profits on that property
> There's huge asymmetry here, landlords have lots of wealth, lots of flexibility, lots of recourse and backup plans, but their tenants often do not
By your logic all business owners similarly are very wealthy and can absorb large losses. So all businesses have a duty to give way several years of profits to needy customers. Food is a necessity of life. Do restaurants have a duty to let customers eat for free?
Equity isn't great for cash flow while you are giving free shelter to your squatter and his family. But it can help you get you that cash-out refi you'll need to pay for the remodel after it got trashed
What planet do you live on? San Francisco? Maybe you can get lucky and accidentally buy a house in a place that becomes the next silicon valley like your landlord.
In the real world, there are thousands of landlords that are just regular people and regular businesses that are not royalty. You can live anywhere you like.
Cash discounting is fine in all states. Surcharges are typically prohibited. Gas stations may be exceptional in that some will publicly advertise the dual pricing where allowable.
Surcharges were prohibited by merchant agreements until the big card networks settled a class action lawsuit. As of 2013 anybody can add a surcharge, provided they follow the card network rules. State laws prohibiting surcharges were struck down by the US Supreme Court in 2017.
They aren't allowed to charge minimum checkout amounts for cards either. I reported a few businesses before when it was more widespread. Some of them (usually gas stations) put up $10 minimum credit card purchases. If they try to pull that on me I usually just say "you know that's against the terms of your merchant agreement" and they'll sometimes run it.
If you had to carry cash for small purchases that would remove the convenience of cards.
The minimums are annoying but understandable. You pay a flat transaction fee (15-30 cents) plus a percentage of the sale (roughly 1-4% depending on the card type). If you’re doing a lot of small transactions, that 15-30 cents is a huge hit to your margins.
Buying a single pack of gum on a rewards credit card might lose the merchant money. They’ll make up for it in aggregate, but that transaction has a negative return. I understand the desire to limit how frequently they sell at a loss.
Credit card agreements used to require parity with cash and no minimums (as Visa and MasterCard had to create new buying habits). But recent laws have placed restrictions on those restrictions.
I get that but sometimes u transact outside and then you decide to go inside and spend a few bucks but then they hit you with a minimum. It's annoying. That 30 cents isn't going to lose money unless you bought something for like 60 cents. Margins are big inside, even if you only spend a few bucks it covers the fee versus no sale. They're just trying to boost basket sizes for more profit.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 permits businesses to impose a minimum purchase amount of up to $10 for credit card use, but the minimum must be the same for all credit card issuers and payment card networks.
Wow, I must be pretty unsophisticated. I always thought cheesecake factory was a fancy place. I guess being located at the fancy retail mall must have colored my perception.
The key difference is that Amazon is selling its infinitely deep platform to third parties. It is those third parties that bear all the risk of developing and marketing a product. Costco and Wal-Mart buyers and merchandisers still need to take the risk of choosing what limited inventory to stock on the shelf and commit resources to making it happen. Amazon also invites all competitors in a product segment to compete with each other. Using the information gathered from the sales, reviews, page views, demographics, and who knows what else, they can create the perfect Amazon basics version of that product pretty much on the fly with pretty low commitment.
Sure it is. Stores rent out space on shelves to manufacturers all the time. The manufacturer even stocks the shelf.
And the store gets to pay them only 2 to 3 months later on top of all of that.
Even when stores buy stuff and stock it themselves, they don't take any risk on it. Unsold stuff gets returned, and they only pay once the merchandise is sold.
Because Costco are taking a risk. You can only have X different widgets on a shelf, its a limited resource so you can't just let every brand in to sell their wares and take a cut. This in turn means Costco has to take on other risks. They're liable for fakes, they're liable if something doesn't sell (I assume Costco probably does sale or return for new suppliers? But there are limits to this). They're doing the fulfilled by Amazon role as well.
Its the difference between a Farmers Market and wholefoods. You as a consumer probably have nothing to do with the market organisers, and they don't have any particular responsibility toward you.
>stuck paying someone else's mortgage.
What he meant was that when someone is not paying the rent, and you are evicting them, you are paying for the living expenses for a stranger who may holding your property hostage, who may be actively abusing the property, who may be deliberately prolonging the experience.
This does not feel good to pay out of your own pocket to shelter someone else's family for any amount of time. There is no recourse to recover the money. Your best outcome it to just get the property back as soon as possible, even if that means rewarding the bad tenant with more money. And in most places in the US now, evictions are not even possible due to virus lockdowns.
Not paying rent is theft. It hurts financially and emotionally when people steal from you.
And for the soft-hearted landlords who didn't screen properly, or took a chance on a sob-story, it was already months of slow-pay or no-pay before you started the eviction. Can you imagine someone stealing 4-6mo of living expenses from you?