Rent Day Is My New Favourite Day
So Rent Day has gone from my least favourite day of the month, to the best. Since buying my first property I’ve stopped paying rent and started collecting it. There’s nothing like going to the bank machine and dropping a bunch of money into your account knowing you’ve earned it and it’s paying for your investment.
With my first rental property, collecting rent was pretty straight forward. My tenant lives in the flat above me so it’s just a matter of knocking on the door – there’s no hiding from me here. Now, my other two properties are a whole different story.
Normally I collect post-dated cheques from each tenant when they sign their lease. Because they’re eager to get the keys to their new place you can pretty much ask anything of them and they’ll come up with it. The issue arises when these tenants don’t have a full year’s worth of cheques, a cheque bounces, or they’ve renewed and you need to collect more cheques. On a side note, I really need to find a economical way to get electronic deposits for all my rent.
This Febrary, I had two tenants who missed their rent. One bounced her post-dated cheque and the other owes me a slew of cheques for the remainder of her lease. I can afford to have only one tenant behind on rent before I have to start taking money out of my own pocket to cover my mortgage payments, so this is a pretty big deal. The tenant who owes me her cheques hasn’t made her rent on time for a number of months, but has been reliable at getting me paid up with little fuss. She deposited her rent directly into my bank account only 7 days late. Just today I was able to collect $550 of $675 owed to me from the second tenant. I’m expecting to collect the balance this coming Friday.
Fortunately I know have enough money to cover my mortgage payments while I wait for the rest of the money to come in. Hopefully she manages to come up with her rent on time next month as that’s only two weeks away!
