You never know when disaster will strike in your apartment. Maybe your toilet will overflow and spill water all over your bathroom floor. Maybe your refrigerator will break down and you’ll need to get a replacement before all of the food inside goes bad. Maybe you’ll find evidence of mice skittering around your kitchen cabinets, tearing through your cereal boxes and chip bags.
You’ll want to be prepared for these disasters when they strike. Here’s how to do that.
1. Have an Emergency Fund
Sometimes, your landlord won’t be available to handle an emergency right away, like an overflowing toilet. They might be busy. They might not be in the building. They could even be asleep. Emergencies can of course strike at inconvenient times, like the middle of the night.
In that case, you’ll want to be able to pay for an emergency expense out of pocket. Putting together an emergency fund can help you do this at any time—it can also come in handy for emergencies that don’t impact your rental unit, like car repairs and phone repairs.
Without an emergency fund, you might not have enough savings to cover any repair costs that fall into your lap. You might have to consider different payment solutions, like one of your credit cards or an online personal loan. Go to a website like CreditFresh to see whether you’re eligible to apply for an online loan there. If you are, you can quickly submit an application and wait to learn about your approval status. And if you happen to get approved for the loan, you can use the borrowed funds to cover your emergency expense as soon as possible.
If you can wait for your landlord to respond to the repair request, wait. Give the landlord some time to respond and hire a professional to fix the problem for you.
2. Know Your Rights for Repairs
If you use your emergency fund to pay for repairs, your landlord should reimburse you. Before you do this, you should inform your landlord about the emergency and what you are doing to address it. Send them a message via email — this will make a paper trail that you can look back on. Do not just tell them over the phone or slip a note under their door. You will want proof that you broached this subject with them.
After informing them, you can go through with the repairs. Be sure to keep copies of the invoices and receipts for the services rendered. You will need to present these to the landlord afterward to prove what you spent and show them what they should reimburse you.
If they do not reimburse you after informing them of the repair and showing them receipts, you can take several measures to recoup your costs, like deducting the repair costs from your rent. Check your state’s property code first to see what options are available to you. You can also contact an attorney that specializes in landlord-tenant law to advise you about your next steps.
3. Get Renters Insurance
Renters insurance can cover damages that your landlord isn’t responsible for, like personal belongings. So, if your belongings get ruined because of an overflowing fixture, you could make an insurance claim and hopefully recoup the financial losses. Renters insurance can also be useful in cases of other disasters, like when a guest injures themselves in your unit.
Your landlord might not respond to an emergency right away. As a renter, you have to be ready to do it all on your own.
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