I'm usually concerned with how fat that HOA fee is and what hinderance the HOA imposes (i.e. no parking on the driveway, all cars must be in the garage) etc.

My car loan has a rate of 3% which ,as others have suggested, can sit on the back burner until it is paid off.

If she had insurance, they would have written her a fat check for her damaged belongings and put her up in a new place.If she wanted out of her lease, I would have let her out.

Nice fat check at closing.

The burner on the stove was left on when she went to lay down and the rest is history...

This will be right before the washer breaks down because it's doing load after load of diapers every day, the microwave breaks down because it's busily heating up formula and breast milk every day, the range starts a fire because the boyfriend is careless about leaving the burners on, the fridge breaks down because he's doesn't give a damn about about making sure it's shut.It all amounts to a compassion tax they're demanding that you pay because they had the shrewdness to break their lease and you had the stupidity to be a landlord.So get rid of them.

At minimum you will pay for a new boiler sized sufficiently to heat the space for the smaller unit, assuming the existing boiler will heat the larger unit.Then you might need to have more of a combustion air supply in order to support the additional burners.

Now, I don;t pay my guys $150 hr. obviously, but some work (especially demo stuff) is priced by the job and has a lot of fat in it for the contractor side.

My best guess is that he's operating on a burner phone, and once you give him a few thousand bucks of materials, he'll sell 'em for ten cents on the dollar and move on to the next patsy(with a new burner phone.)

In case of plumbing emergencies there's always those plumbing chains like roto-rooter but you may want to find someone cheaper and also an electrician, HVAC guy to have on your back burner for emergencies.