He's At It Again...

Good Ol' Murphy he's gone and done it again, sort of.

I'm about to express my humble opinion on why if you rent you can't afford to NOT have an emergency fund in place.

Our landlord is selling.

We're lucky though for a few reasons.

One we live in WA. Over here in the west if you are in a rental contract and the owner sells the new owners have to see out your existing lease. So we are lucky that we have till July next year till we may have to move. I say may as I'm holding out hope that another investor will buy it and let us continue renting here till we are through with our Debt snowball.

Two we have time. If it is not an investor that purchases the property we have time to save moving costs, de clutter more crap, find another rental we like instead of taking the first house that is available.

Three and the most important is that we have an emergency fund in place.

A few short months ago if we had had to move quickly we would have been up that proverbial creek.
Today we have an emergency fund in place so IF we did have to move a lot sooner we would be able to do so WITHOUT getting into more debt.



An honest show of hands right now, who could financially afford to move next week if you had to?? Keep in mind the average bond on a rental property is around $1400, moving costs could add up to $500 possibly more, that brings us to almost $2000.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that had I asked that to a room full of renters the show of hands would have been dismal.

It's not something many think about. Moving costs when you have no intention to move. As a renter though it should be a priority.

This is one of the main reasons I loathe renting. At the end of the day it is not secure. If you rent you should have the ability to move your family immediately if the need arises.

A new bond at least but as not everyone has a handful of family and friends with Utes and trailers then truck hire as well and you should probably think about incorporating cleaning costs also, carpets and windows all need to be cleaned professionally when you vacate a rental house.

Chances are you may not ever use it but chances are if you don't have it you'll end up needing it.

Please think some more on starting an emergency fund. Go back and read through my original post if you're after ideas on how to go about it.

Skye




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