difficult situation, please help!

[Mason Moran]

hello all, I have a tennent who's retired military. He's receiving a retirement check, disability, BAH (from his GI Bill) as well as him and his fiance both work full time. I received a text stating, "Good morning. I wanted to give you a heads up about the rent. My term for school was split in October, I.e. classes ended on the 14th and started again the 23rd. So they processed my BAH was processed as two separate drafts. I have the first one but I won’t receive the second one until Thursday or so. I’ll have the rent Friday and will deposit straight into your account Friday morning." That was sent 6NOV17. Still have not received any payments rent is due on the first and anything after is a 100 dollar late fee. For the past two days I haven't received ANY communication back from the tenants. What should I do? Anyone on here deal with the eviction process, specifically in Virginia? thanks for any help!

[Jon Holdman]

There's a funny thing about landlording.  Folks would never go to the grocery store with a story of why they should get free groceries.  Or the gas station.   But somehow its always expected that landlords should be flexible as far as paying the rent.

First there's this weirdness with the VA payments. Now he's lost his job, too. At best he's living on the edge financially. But may well be there's more to this than you're hearing and he's stringing you along. He lost his job two weeks ago, but the initial excuse for no rent was the VA payments. Now you're hearing about the job. What else is waiting in the wings to be the next reason you don't have rent? These are the tenant's problems, not yours. Your problem is the lack of rent. Stay focused on that and not all this "story".

I'll stand by the advice to find a landlord/tenant attorney.   You need one in any any case.  And get their advice on how to proceed.