Question About Changing Rental Periods and Rent Due Dates

[Jim M.]

Need some advice on a rental house I just purchased.

I just purchased a small house that was already tenant occupied, but that had no written lease. I confirmed the rental amount ($750.00) and security deposit (also $750.00) with the tenants (boyfriend and girlfriend). All is good there.

However, today the boyfriend informed me that they were paying the rent on the 2nd Friday of each month, not the 1st due to their paycheck schedules. I got them to agree to a fixed date of the 15th of each month. The problem is that I really don't want to have to wait until the 15th of each month to find out if they are paying on time because with grace periods and normal delays I would probably not know if they were going fully delinquent on rent until a few days from the end of the month so the tenants would essentially be getting a free month of rent on me. Therefore, I was thinking about changing the rental period from the 1st of each month to the end of each month to the 15th of each month to the 14th of the next month. This would require that I get 45 days of rent for November to cover all of November and December 1-14. From that point forward the rent would just be due on the 15h of each month.

The problems are as follows:

1. I am not sure if the buyers could afford paying $750.00 + $375.00 for the period of 11/1/2014 to 12/14/2014 (i.e. 1.5 months rent).

2. I want to find an easy way to explain this to the tenants.

Does anyone have any input or a better idea how to handle this abnormal rent payment schedule?