<p>So my roommates moved into our apartment in June but I already went back home for the summer. It is a 4 bedroom apartment but at the time, including me, it was only 3 people. When I mailed my check in, I sent in only my part (what the rent would be if it was split 4 ways) because that's what my roommate said to send in. When the time came for them to move-in, that same roommate said I owed another $75 to pay for the 4th room. I was frustrated with him already because he threatened to find another roommate to take my place if I didn't sign the lease in time so he can move-in instead of living at a friend's house. Being a nice person, I signed the lease that same day that he threatened me. I had to call the rental office multiple times to e-mail me the lease. But I could've just signed it on the 15th instead so I can save myself some money since the room would then be prorated for 15 days and the 15th was when my second roommate would've needed to move-in and the roommate living at the friend's house could've just lived at the friend's house until then. The other thing is, it would've taken the leasing office a whole week and a half in order to approve another roommate. Plus, we didn't even have a fourth roommate yet, so where was my roommate going to find a fourth roommate and a replacement for me? y'know? So I did fully intend to pay the $75 until my mom found out and started telling me why I shouldn't. She made plenty of sense too. Why should I pay when I wasn't even using the room? I already payed a fourth of it. I know they couldn't have moved-in without my signature but even if they could've, they would've payed even more if I didn't pay my quarter of the rent. We've since found a 4th roommate and he didn't pay for June's rent yet he can say it's because he wasn't there and didn't sign the lease yet. And that is totally understandable. But I wasn't there either. I only signed the lease because the leasing office needed 3 people on the lease in order for anyone to move-in. So what do I do? Do I pay that $75? I know I'll have to live with my roommates for a whole year and it'll be so weird if I said I'll send him the $75 but then end up not doing it. What do I do? I can't even afford my quarter of the room for July without borrowing from my brother.</p>
<p>So, I’m confused. Why are you the one expected to pay the extra rent?</p>
<p>Whether or not you are present is irrelevant.</p>
<p>If there are 4 people signed on to a year long lease for a 4 bedroom apartment you owe 1/4 of the total rent. If you’re not using your room, the onus is on you to find someone to sublet your room to and pay that contribution.</p>
<p>If there are 3 people signed on to a year long lease for a 4 bedroom apartment than you ALL owe 1/3 of the total rent. If you’re not using your room, the onus is on you to find someone to sublet your room to and pay that contribution.</p>
<p>Post 3 is correct.</p>
<p>Here is another way to look at it, each independent of the other:
- You owe 1/3 of one month’s rent for June because you signed the lease with two others, knowing there was not yet a fourth roommate. (Depending on how the lease is written, it is possible that you would owe all of the rent for the entire year if the other roommates skipped out on you, but you don’t want to go there!)
- It sounds like you told one of your roommates that you would send the $75 and are now having second thoughts. Not doing what you said you would do will make people think you are unreliable.
- As you recognized, you will be living with these roommates for the entire school year, and having a problem now can have repercussions that end up with a cost of more than $75.</p>
<p>The roommate organizing this should have signed up all four people at the same time, or told the fourth roommate up front that he would owe 1/4 of the full year’s rent, divided into 12 increments. You can ask the organizer to ask the fourth roommate, but it seems unlikely that this will be possible, as the organizer already had a financial reason to ask this and apparently got nowhere.</p>
<p>I am truly sorry to hear that this is causing financial strain.</p>
<p>I understand that legally I would be responsible for 1/3 of it and my roommates would want that too but if you were in his spot, would you sympathize with me? I after all did sign the lease so he could move in earlier. (Plus he’s always bragging about having two jobs -_-) And do you think the 4th roommate should be responsible in anyway? Even though the fourth roommate would not sign the lease until now (end of June).</p>
<p>If I didn’t want to be responsible for the fourth room, I wouldn’t have signed the lease. If you were only doing it so that your roommate could move in earlier, you should have established beforehand who was going to pay the rate for the fourth room. If he was willing to do it in exchange for you helping him out, then that’s fine, but it doesn’t sound like you made that arrangement beforehand. The fourth roommate shouldn’t be responsible for rent that occurred before he signed the lease. He’s not responsible for backpaying the rent.</p>
<p>I get that you feel like your friend pushed you into the rent, and you don’t want to pay for something that you didn’t use. It sucks, but that’s the situation you’ve found yourself in. Learn from it, and don’t do the same thing next time. But I still think you’re responsible for 1/3 of the rent for that month. I know money’s tight, but I don’t think $75 is worth a falling out with your roommates, unless you’re prepared to find somewhere else to live.</p>
<p>Yeah, you’ve basically said everything I was thinking. I hate myself for being such a pushover and not thinking things through.</p>
<p>Hey, there’s no need to be down on yourself about this. It may sound like some of us have all the answers. However, from my standpoint, I am a 52-year-old lawyer; I should have some answers!</p>
<p>Chalk this up to experience and consider it a great reason to read thoroughly any legal document someone asks you to sign. I cannot tell you the number of times someone has asked me to sign something without reading the document and asking questions. They will summarize the document, say it is a standard form, and expect me to sign based on their verbal summary. It happened once for a car loan. The loan guy was becoming apoplectic over the fact that I actually wanted to read his standard form. It turned out that there were a lot of hidden charges that I had specifically said I wasn’t agreeing to, and he had tried to stick them in anyway. </p>
<p>My point is not that you didn’t read the lease, but that any time someone pressures you to sign something quickly, you can legitimately say, “I have been burned before, so I can’t rush into this.”</p>
<p>Thanks for being so nice. Yeah from now on I will read everything and think everything through. I used to read everything but then life happens quickly and I get pressured to just sign things just cause reading everything would take a real long time. Sad thing is I read the lease but didn’t think of the repercussions money-wise. But like you and others pointed out, lesson learned.</p>
<p>For future reference, it would have been perfectly reasonable to tell the one roommate who wanted to move in early that he had to pay for that 1/2 month’s rent solo.</p>