Imagine renting an apartment and then getting a job that’s so far away you’d have to move. Would you move out before your lease were up even if it meant paying a fee for breaking the lease, or would you continue to pay rent until your lease was up?

In this story, one couple is in this situation, and they try to give the landlord as much notice as possible that they’re moving out. Instead of being grateful for the heads up, the landlord points out just how expensive it will be if they break their lease.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Small-scale malicious compliance involving my landlord

So context: me and my fiancée live in the USA and had an opportunity in another state that required us to move pretty quick.

Our lease required 60 days of notice before we move out plus a buy-out fee, but because of the situation, we weren’t able to give 60 days of notice.

We’re also already not really happy with our landlord because she called us 6 days before we moved in to this unit (about 10 months before all this went down) and told us she would have to delay our move in by a week and move us to a completely different unit because the people in our unit decided last minute not to move out, despite being required to by the same lease we signed.

Not that I want to kick these people out on their butts with no place to stay, but our landlord didn’t really apologize to us, instead just emphasized how much of a tough situation these tenants put her in by remaining in our unit.

But there were other problems after they moved in.

In an emergency, we had to stay with my fiancée’s family for that week before moving in.

On top of that, she really hasn’t been the best while we’ve lived here.

The only way the office will accept any kind of correspondence from residents is through their online portal (we’re not allowed to email them directly, only call, and even then we can’t place maintenance requests over the phone), and the online portal has been down a total of almost 90 days that we’ve lived there.

Not 90 days in a row, but there was a 2-month period where it was down completely and it was down sporadically throughout the rest of our stay. No alternative for the portal was ever provided.

He informed the landlord that they’d be moving out.

So here’s the story.

I send our landlord an email letting her know that we needed to move out soon; I think the date was 45 days from when I sent the email.

In the email, I included that we understood our financial obligation and that we intended to continue paying rent through the end of our lease, since we really aren’t giving her 60 days notice before the move out.

I wanted to give her the courtesy of being able to rent out the unit, or at least begin to look for other renters and have them move in sooner so the unit remains occupied and they can rent it out sooner.

The landlord was not at all understanding.

Our landlord shoots back insisting that we must give 60 days notice before moving out and that we must pay the buy-out fee to leave early (the buy-out fee was about 3 months of rent and we had 3 months left on the lease, so we would have to pay the 60 days of rent and then the buy-out fee on top of that).

She stressed that we NEEDED to read the lease before bothering her because all of this information was already in there.

On top of that, she included several pages of the lease, including the page with the clause about needing to move out if another tenant has signed a lease for your unit.

Cue malicious compliance.

He informed the landlord that they changed their minds.

Maybe it was her including that clause that upset me, but I had enough at that point.

I emailed her back and simply said “upon further review of our lease, we’ve decided to stay until the end of our lease on [Date]. As that date is more than 60 days away, I hope it is alright if you consider this our notice that we are moving out and do not plan on renewing our lease. Thank you!”

A couple weeks later, my fiancée and I packed our bags and moved out, leaving the unit empty.

My aunt and uncle live nearby, so we gave them the keys they went to check on the unit and run the lights and the water about once a week to make sure everything was still working.

The landlord never found out what they did.

Our landlord emailed us a couple times near the end of our lease asking if we would be out of the unit so they could bring their new tenants in to tour the unit.

Unfortunately for her, we were always busy and the apartment was never clean, so she couldn’t give them a tour of our unit.

When our lease was up, I took a trip back to town to drop off the keys and do our final checkout.

Overall, we saved several thousand dollars that we would have had to pay in rent, and we cost her several thousand dollars in revenue from not renting out her empty unit for two months.

She was none the wiser.

Seeing out the lease definitely seemed to be the most cost effective option for this couple.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

I’m not sure how it cost the landlord anything either.

This is true.

This person makes a very good point!

Here’s a helpful tip about buyout fees.

It’s better to pay the rent than pay extra fees.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.