3 tips for getting a low budget rental house.

If you’re a renter, your rent is going to be one of if not the biggest expense in your monthly budget, and when you’re trying to get out of debt every dollar counts. Here you can find three tips for renting a home. There are a ton of factors to consider when it comes to finding and choosing a rental property, especially if you’re working on paying off debt. You need to consider how long your commute will be, whether or not you feel the neighborhood is safe and how close you’ll be to places like grocery stores and shopping centers that you’ll be visiting on a regular basis and that’s all before you even begin to look at specific homes or apartments. It can be a huge challenge especially if you’re unfamiliar with where you’re moving.

So how can you make sure you end up with a great rental? Tip number one is to figure out what your needs are separately from your wants. For example, you might want to live in a big home with lots of rooms in a nice long driveway, or you might want to live in a penthouse apartment in the middle of downtown. Do you truly need to live in either of those places? Think critically about how many bedrooms you actually need, spare guest rooms are nice to have. But if having one adds two hundred dollars per month to your rent, you’re looking at spending an extra twenty four hundred dollars per year, money that would be better off directed at your debt. Maybe a common area in an apartment complex can serve the same purpose as that balcony off the master bedroom you wanted. Maybe a townhome can enable you to avoid those upstairs and downstairs neighbors who are always making so much noise instead of that single-family home. The more luxuries you’re willing to sacrifice now, the faster you’ll be done with your debt and on to the next stage of your life, when you finally get out of debt and look at buying a home well beyond the essentials list. The second tip is to really evaluate your budget, how much are you comfortable spending on rent each month. Most advice online will recommend spending anywhere from 25% to 35% of your monthly take-home pay on housing. In general that’s the range you would look for when it comes to finding a rental home. Let’s pretend your goal is to get out of debt and save up to purchase a home, maybe even start saving for retirement. If you are spending forty or fifty percent of your take-home pay on rent there probably won’t be much money left over after all of your other monthly expenses.

So you’ve decided what area you’d like to live in, what your needs are and what your budget is. It’s time to start looking for an actual place to live. Here is tip number three, find a local landlord. You’ll get the most bang for your buck if you find someplace where you’re dealing directly with the owner. I’m talking about someone who owns a few properties and rents them out. Think about the situation from that person’s perspective, every month their property sits empty, they’re losing out on that rent money in certain areas. After just 2 or 3 months they could be out four or five thousand dollars in rent, that owner is going to be motivated to get the place rented. So they’re going to offer you a competitive price and once you’re moved in, they’re going to treat you well as a tenant so that you’ll renew your lease and keep renting from them. If you go to one of these massive apartment complexes with two or three hundred units, they don’t care as much of an apartment sits empty for a few months, nor do they really care if you renew or move out at the end of your lease, the only guarantees are that the rent will go up every year and that it will be a hassle to get anything fixed properly. Try Craigslist or Facebook marketplace when looking for one of these magical deals.