Being clever can sometimes go a long way!

These boys were getting some trouble from their landlord about late fees, but they knew how to turn the narrative around.

When the landlord told them to look at their lease, they found the ammunition they needed to get the landlord to back down.

Check out the full story!

“As per the lease” we owe you late fees?! Let’s check that lease again…

So this happened in college to me and my friends.

We moved into a house from some small rental company based in the area after signing a year long lease.

House is great, no problems, but we were told a week or so after moving in we would have to send our rent checks each month by the 5th by mail to their new office in the town 120 miles over.

Whatever, barely a problem so we just go with it.

Things were fine with the arrangement until…

So for the next 6 months or so we both mail our rent checks at the same time by the 1st of each month, and never had any problems.

Then one day my friend receives a call from the landlord saying we owe 100+ dollars each in late fees because 2 months our rent checks came in the mail a day after they were due.

They were DEFINITELY postmarked AT LEAST 3 days before that, but that’s not the point.

UH OH!

So he says, “per the lease you each owe 50 dollars for each month it is late and so that is 200 dollars total”

And we said well it was definitely postmarked multiple days in advance and its not our fault the USPS didn’t deliver it on time, and that we had no way to know that it wasn’t delivered on time, so how could we be accountable for these fees?

He responded with, “Go read the document, per the lease your late fees are stated clearly, you have until next month to pay” then he hung up.

We pulled up our lease, and just as he asked us to do, we read it.

He was right – based on all we knew we each owed them 100 bucks – damn.

They knew there had to be some mistake!

But, in a section regarding payment, CLEARLY stated, we were to HAND DELIVER our rent checks to their office which was still addressed to their OLD office in town, and the address we were supposed to deliver them to WAS NOT the one they had us sending our checks to.

So we called them back, “we looked at the lease, and per the lease, we are not required to send checks to that office but to this office insert old office address so we will be bringing our checks there from now on and will not be paying any late fees because we technically never even agreed in the lease to mail our checks.

They caught the landlord with this one!

The landlord flipped saying we were being children, that this was unfair, and he was going to get our parents on the phone (he literally said that, despite the fact both our parents were obviously on our side and we were 20ish year old people).

We just said “well if you want your rent money we will bring it to the location described in our signed lease, since as per the lease you need it delivered there and we don’t feel comfortable mailing them to unknown locations”.

Inevitably he buckled, he knew he was at fault, and dropped the late fees and said we wouldn’t owe any more late fees ever so long as the envelope was post marked on the right day.

They finally settled with the new system.

Every month after that we waited until the day before to mail them out, ensuring they wouldn’t receive their money until at least a couple days after it was due.

We stayed in the house the next year (aside from this instance, they weren’t too bad compared to some other college town landlords) and they changed the lease so it couldn’t happen again.

Felt good.

GEEZ! These guys did the right thing by looked at the least and using what they learned to their advantage.

The landlord must not have looked at the lease himself!

Let’s find out what people on Reddit commented under this story.

This user believes the landlord probably thought he won.

This user believes it is always good to check every detail before signing or agreeing.

This user thought the boys had other plans with the checks.

That’s right! This user commends these guys on standing up for themselves.

This user knows landlords can be a real pain.

Someone was being tricky here!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.