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As a landlord of multiple properties in Boston I can confirm the parents pay the rent.
by figers 10y ago
As a landlord of multiple properties in Boston I can confirm the parents pay the rent.
- jff 10y agoOne of my college roommates would get a small stack of signed blank checks from his mother every time he went home, in order to pay the rent and whatever else came up. He kept them underneath his mattress, which we discovered when we had to move from one apartment to another and his ass never showed up to help.
- Godel_unicode 10y agoAnd here I am, paranoid about having unsigned checks laying around because they have my account and ACH # on them. Other people's tolerance for risk always amazes me!
- johnchristopher 10y agoEh. Usage of checks in the US always puzzled me but now that we have smartphones with direct access to our bank and it seems even weirder to still do things with checks (vs cash).
- khedoros1 10y agoWhen I've used checks, it's been almost exclusively to pay bills for things that don't have an electronic payment system set up, and where I also don't want to drop $1500 cash into the landlord's mail slot for rent. I know that we're missing easy money transfer options that other countries have had for decades, though.
- mahyarm 10y agoMore like unawareness of risk.
- beachstartup 10y agoif you have enough money, there is no risk. you simply call the bank, and tell them to credit you the money back, which they do immediately, and then they launch an investigation into the felony crime which occurred. they'll send you a couple of affidavits to sign in the mail later. it's even easier with a credit card because the money was never taken to begin with. and get this, with amex you don't even have to call, because they call you, and you tell them which charges you want deleted, while they send you a new card. not having money totally sucks in comparison.
- aczerepinski 10y agoMy wife and I are both engineers in our mid 30s, and owning a modest home with a 30 minute commute to the city can probably never happen. The amount of old money around here is staggering. I was raised in the midwest, and can't think of any communities back there where a two-engineer household couldn't live. So yeah it doesn't surprise me fresh liberal arts grads in Boston are getting help.
- sokoloff 10y agoBoston area? Plenty of places where a two engineer family can buy within 30 mins. Belmont, Malden, Melrose, Somerville, Chelsea, Revere, Dorchester, West Roxbury, parts of Arlington and Cambridge all should have affordable (for two engineers) housing.
- aczerepinski 10y agoYeah I guess you're right about that. My wife works far west of Boston, so I've only looked at the towns in between.
- sokoloff 10y agoYeah, the Rt 9 corridor doesn't have much cheap inside of 30 minutes of Boston downtown (esp since 30 mins isn't that far with rush hour traffic)
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoA Somerville double-decker these days can be sold for a million dollars, one of its constituent apartments for half that. Two engineers can afford a $500k mortgage?
- sokoloff 10y agoAbsolutely! $200K down and $166K annual income and you can buy the whole $1MM property. $83K/pp income seems completely reasonable for two engineers (and crazy low for two SWEs!) in their 30s. With a combined annual income of only $85K/yr and $100K down, you can buy a $500K property. No way are two engineers in 30s making less than that... (Two train engineers driving for Keolis make more than that.) Without a 20% down payment, you need a little more income, but it's still well within reach of normal professionals who decide they want to prioritize buying a property.