Rental Agreement With Split Payment

[Stan Butler]

As the economy continues to be sluggish, I am getting more requests from tenants to make their payment in 2 monthly installments. How do you other landlord account for this schedule?? I can think of a couple of ways:

1) Agreement with 2 payments dates (say 5th and 20th) and have late fees accrue from each date.

2) Agreement with full payment due by the 20th ($50 higher), but violation of agreement would occur if 1/2 not paid by the 5th.

Anybody else run into this scenario??

[David Frol]

@Stan Butler , I would go with the 2nd option, having the rent be due on the 20th, but I would not charge them any extra for that (not a good strategy in sluggish economy). The solution can be very simple, just have them pay for the current month pro-rated amount from the 1st through the 20th. And then the next payment would be from the 20th of current month through the 20th of the next month. This way they are paying rent in advance as it should be and not for the past month. You can play with those dates any way you want, who said that the rental period has to start on the 1st and rent due date to be on the 1st? I think you have a simple solution here.