Thank you,  This is not normal (in fact this is crazy talk) and you should be dumping this contractor, perhaps suing him to recover some of what you've paid, and getting a new contractor.

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If you're moving away and don't want the strings attached to repairs, tenants, management, HOA, etc, then it may be best to sell it and recover as much equity as possible!.

But even talking to a stranger about not being able to help him recover his life savings was among the worst conversations in our lives.

Currently in a law suit trying to recover my money

What would be the best way to approach this situation to recover the money owed? 

I was just looking in our county's online court docket and see a company based in our area called something like Rent Recover handling plenty of cases, so I was going to check it out and see if maybe they can do something.

While living in it, why don't you rent out furnished rooms to generate cashflow to recover the costs of the furnishings?

At $400/month additional rent using 50% rule on expenses is $200 cash flow or 150 months to recover the cost.  

This isnt hard to recover from .