All Forum Posts by: Natalia Collini

Thanks @John Rogers. I will remember that. :-)

Hello! Newbie here. I've been creeping around on the site for over 10 months but haven't made the commitment to participate until now. So hi!

I am a mother to 5 children six and under and we recently moved to Florida after living up in Nome, Alaska. We have finally gotten ourselves settled in and we are ready to start the next step of our journey...investing in real estate. 

Our short term goals are to flip houses and use the profits to purchase buy and holds. Longer term goals include apartment complexes. Creative financing will be a must for us but we are determined and we shall find a way!

Right now I'm still in the education stage but I am starting to feel like I'm ready to move on to the next phase. Finding deals (and partners) and getting started. 

I'm also working on getting my real estate license. 

I'm excited to be getting involved here finally, and I look forward to connecting with you all in the days to come. 

Happy investing!

~Natalia

Hey John, 

Welcome to BiggerPockets! From one newbie to another my advice would be this. subscribe to the newsletter and read every article in each newsletter. Listen to the podcast any time you are out driving around or doing housework or other mindless activities. Spend 10 minutes on the forums every day reading and participating. Before long you won't be asking "what am I missing?" anymore but instead you will be asking yourself "now that I know what to do what actionable steps can I take to get to my next step?" There is so much information available here for free that you really don't need to go anywhere else.

I hope that helps and if you want to connect, I'm here. Good luck and see you around the forums!

~Natalia

Thanks @Rick S. I will definitely look into it. :-)

@Matt Vogt I made my initial payment before their due date. I received notice from my bank that my payment wouldn't clear on their end the day AFTER their due date. We went and got a money order immediately after that and they had the money order in their hands after their due date, but before their records showed that we owed any money. On their end, our electronic withdrawal had not yet bounced and we were the ones to let them know that it was going to happen. 

We do use the vents. The issue ended up being a leaking bathtub, which they finally came in and repaired. No more mold. Now if they would just fix my dishwasher I could actually live with the freezer issues. My husband is half tempted to bring in his own dishwasher that he has at work and replace it with theirs. We're just not sure if that's something that they would allow and he's worried that if we ask they will say no.

@Rick S. The late fee is $100 and the NSF is $50. This complex doesn't accept debit or credit or cash. Money orders, cashier checks, or electronic checks if you go through their website. 

@Dawn Anastasi It is $100 for the late fee and $50 for the NSF fee. 

By refuse to fix I mean they have come over 3 times to "work on it" which means they start the cycle and then check to make sure the water is coming out of the jets. Then they tell me to test it out and let them know if it works. The last time I was told to only load the top to make sure I'm not blocking anything from working properly. Nothing gets cleaned no matter how I load it and run it. With 5 children to wash dishes for, I feel like I'm living in the kitchen to keep everything clean and the cockroaches in check. (yes, there is a cockroach infestation in the building as well. I knew about it from previous reviews before moving in, but we needed a place to relocate to and this was the first available place to go in our price range).

My fridge is also broken. The freezer door has a gap that lets warm air in. As a result the freezer is always running and freezing my veggies and eggs (I'm starting to get used to mashing my eggs with a potato masher in the morning) in the fridge and everything in the freezer is lined with ice and snow and is freezer burned. The last time I showed them that I need to use duct tape to keep it shut (I've been through a whole roll already and it doesn't work well as a solution) the response was "I need to think about that one" and I never heard back from them. 

Most recently we have discovered that we were paying for a hot water leak of theirs. We have washer dryer hook ups here and we bought our own washer/dryer so we wouldn't have to keep using the community ones. I was initially nervous to bring one in and pay for the extra electricity to run loads because our meter was running about $5 in energy a day! While hooking everything up my husband noticed that we were leaking A LOT of hot water out of the water heater because the w/d hook up was not secured properly. After we got it set up and started running several loads a day with our w/d I noticed that my daily energy charges had dropped to $3 dollars a day on average. That's about a $60/month difference!!

As I told my father-in-law the day I moved in "I know where I live" so I get that this kind of stuff comes with substandard housing. I just moved from Alaska where substandard housing was the norm, so I'm used to it. I guess I just felt the need to vent a bit about my situation. lol. What better place than here?

They have already been paid. Paying them wasn't the issue. The hostile notice on our door was. A friendly note letting us know that the fee we had discussed with them earlier had come due would have sufficed. But at this point, it is what it is. 

Thanks for the tip. It doesn't look like we have any repair laws like that here, but it's certainly something to keep in mind for future reference. :-)

Ok. Thanks for the prompt responses. :-)

It is a terrible place to be living but at the same time there are many worse places out there I'm sure. 

Re: cleaning. Thanks for the tip. We did clean it. With bleach. The mold came back. 

I understand the NSF fees, perhaps I should clarify that my post was more a shock response towards the hostility with which we were treated. A couple days after I posted this I came home from running errands to find a notice on my door that the fines needed to be paid within 3 days or else the eviction process would be started! In Alaska we were never treated this way and we are good tenants so to be treated like we are trying to cheat them really surprised and maybe even hurt us. 

But I guess it just goes with the territory of living in substandard housing. 

I have a question regarding late/NSF fees. 

I attempted to pay my rent online this month since I wasn't able to get a money order in time to pay the rent. I used their payment portal which only allows transactions directly through your bank account. I linked my savings account that I use specifically for rent money and I received notice that my payment was accepted. Two days ago I got a notice from my bank that that account does not allow that sort of transaction and that the payment would not go through and that we should contact the other party to let them know they would not get their funds. My husband and I went right to the store to get a money order and brought it over to them. Their records still show today that we have paid a full balance for the month, so the NSF hasn't hit yet. Today the Assistant manager called to let us know that we will have to pay the NSF and late fee AFTER it hits on their end and that fee will be $150. This doesn't seem fair to me since we did pay on time and made every effort to get the payment in once we realized the first transaction wouldn't work out. 

On top of this they refuse to fix our dishwasher or our fridge and we have black mold growing in our bathroom, and an apartment that overall is just in really bad shape and falling apart around us. 

Can we refuse to pay the fee? What do we do in this situation? Thanks in advance for any help!