Terry Sprouse

I’ve had a married couple in one of my rental houses for 16 months. I have them mail their monthly rental checks to my PO Box, as I do my other tenants. Yesterday, they called and asked me to give them my PO Box address so they could mail in the check. They had misplaced the address. Misplaced the address? In the past they have lost their keys. They have also lost their copy of the rental contract. Last month they mailed the check to the wrong address, and had to cancel their money orders and send me new ones (precipitating yesterday’s request).

Granted, I don’t have the greatest memory in the world. I call my kids the wrong names all the time, and yes, sometimes I absentmindedly use our dog’s name when calling out to one son (in my defense, both their names start with the same first letter). But, you’d think the mailing address for the landlord is such an important piece of information that they would try to make a special effort to keep track of it. I call that a little quirky.

Quirky tenants, of course, are better than out-and-out bad tenants who won’t take care of the house and don’t pay on time. I’ll take quirky any day. In either case, it’s always comforting to remember that whoever occupies your house is ultimately helping you to achieve your goals of financial independence. Each day that you have a tenant in the house, they pay off part of your mortgage, you clear a certain amount from the rental payment, and the value of your house goes up an average of 5% each year. (Well, it doesn’t go up 5% per year these days, but that’s the 30-year average. And, we have to be grateful for the big boost in equity that we received in the 2005-2006 housing boom.)

In general, if we have rental properties and long term-tenants, that’s a pretty good situation to be in.

Speaking of quirky tenants, check out Will Ferrell in The Landlord Video.

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