I'm just a nice guy thats just pissed because hot girls, unlike the decent-looking average ones that I can have success with, are so damn difficult. A lot has changed since I was in college, but there are a few facts of life that are timeless. It's true that many college students receive a lot of money from their parents. Of course, it's always been like that, just not to the degree that you see today. Does it matter? I don't it matters that much.
I have no problem being flirty and friendly with these girls in classes, but I can't seem to take it to the next level because I don't have anything cool to invite them to do "Hey, wanna go grab some coffee and engage in some stimulating conversation?" (choice of words was not accidental.. I don't know why it works, but it works ("grab", "engage", "stimulating"))
Also, once you've got the attention of the hottie du jour, you're probably not going to want to take her to the local meat market, I mean, bar. You won't be able to hear each other, she's going to get hit on incessantly, and that will not help your confidence. I used to have a canned first date that worked like a charm. It started at a local comedy club. Chicks like to laugh, and if you go to a comedy club (before you tell me how lame this is, remember it was years ago), you can make her laugh without even having a sense of humor. And since it's improv, you have 800 topics of conversation at your fingertips for the rest of the night. Hint: pick the dirty ones.
The secret to chicks: confidence. There is a fine line between ego and confidence. Cross it every once in a while.
The secret to hot chicks: stand out. They get hit on every minute of every day by the very "frat boys" you deplore. You're not one of them. Don't try to be one, because even if you succeed, you will be just another "frat boy" to be cycled and recycled through.
Many of these girls, do not "date", they "hang out", and run through a lot of guys. And it's little wonder why. After a while, all guys start to look the same when you're getting hit on all day long.
Chasing tail is a lot like applying to ivy league schools. Because they get so many applicants, your acceptance and rejection comes across as totally arbitrary, so you had better apply to a dozen schools. You just never know what a particular girl will be into, so it pays to shop around.
I am not going to spend all my money on "floozies", I know how to manage and save my money now (I have a retirement account that I started myself when I was 17). Knowing how to manage your money is a great life skill, and you should be commended for your responsibility. The gold-diggers you have your sights set on will probably be less impressed by your Roth IRA balance, however. Surprisingly few of them have the patience to wait until age 59 1/2 to get their hands on your money.;)
As much as it pisses me off to have to play this game, its the way it seems to work. I have seen plenty of husband/wife combinations of rich guys with girls they never could have wheeled in college. How do you know the guys are rich? What makes you think that you will be rich after college?
Also, remember that being rich is less important now than it was years ago. Chicks have their own money and no longer need yours. I know a lot of women (my age, granted) who make six figure salaries. What kind of cash do you intend to impress them with?
In retrospect, I had a great time in college and a great time in high school. Don't bide your time until you graduate--the game only moves up to the next level. Figure out how to make it work today. You have nothing to lose.
Go make some memories so you'll have something to get all nostalgic about when you're old like me.
P.S. Do not bitch about how difficult it is to date in college/high school/the workplace/whatever. Girls really, really hate that--it is the exact opposite of confidence.
(Of course, I might be influenced by the enforced abstinence due to my wife's pregnancy...;) My wife's pregnant, and there is no abstinence! Last go around, she had a fascist OB/GYN for awhile who kept saying, "no sex for 2 weeks." She has a new OB now.
Be that as it may, if you approach in terms of possibilities instead of probabilities, you just become a hypochondriac recluse who will be driven to insanity.
"There is the possibility that I will have a heart attack if I don't exercise."
"There is the possibility that I will break my neck if I exercise."
"There is the possibility that I choke on my food if I eat."
"There is the possibility that I get hit by a car if I cross the street."
"There is the possibility that I get struck by lightning if I go outside."
I could go on forever. There is always the possibility that something dreadful is going to befall you. You have to just let it go or you will be paralyzed.
Remember, even if the condom does split, your chances of HIV infection are 1/300 that the girl is HIV+ and 1/1000 that an HIV+ girl can transmit it to a guy. You are going to have to have a hell of a lot of unprotected sex before you get HIV.
Right, which is why it became an epidemic in the gay community in the 80's Define "epidemic". Currently there are 1M HIV+ individuals in the US. On the other hand, there are 5.7M Americans who have had a stroke. 700,000 Americans have a stroke each and every year.
why it's wiping out entire generations in Africa Your infection probability increases dramatically while being raped due to lacerations on the genitals. Africa also has a problem with sterile hospital equipment. I don't see how this relates to consensual, protected sex back in the US.
However, that still leaves the matter of the girl's family, who may vary... Who may.... what? What comes after the ellipses?
when they found my brother was, granted he was something like 17 at the time, my parents were rather upset by it. Were they really that upset? How do you know?
Armchair Psychologist says: you have difficulty connecting with people, especially intimately, because of your Asperger's. Social isolation feels more natural to you. The "reasons" that you give for sexual abstention... are they not more like "consolations"?
In all my years of having sex, I have never had a condom split. Somebody must be doing something wrong.
Now let's analyze this attitude. A full 1 million Americans are HIV+ out of a population of 302 million. So there is a 1 in 300 chance that that hot chick you picked up at the bar is HIV+, give or take.
The chance of an HIV+ woman infecting a man through one act of unprotected sex is between 0.1% and 1%. The 1% figure is for men with genital lacerations. Let's take a rate of 0.5%.
Condoms are known to block HIV transmission. The average breakage/slippage rate for condoms is a whopping 4.6% (hello, people! Learn to use the tools!).
Ok. So let's say you pick up a chick at the bar and go home and have protected sex. You are two orders of magnitude more likely to get killed by a car while walking to her house than you are to contract HIV from her.
As someone who is long-since out of college, please assure you that your luck is not going to change until your attitude does. Seriously:
Chicks may dig money, but plenty of guys have more money and less ego than you.
If you spend all of your money on floozies, you will have no money left with which to attract these "money-grubbing whores" you seek. Once they spend your money, why should they hang around?
Moral of the story, smart, rich guys get all the hotties when it matters, so just wait until you are making a good living and the dumb-ass frat boys are stuck in cube-ville with their bullshit degrees. I think that you'll find this not to be true. In addition, I think you will find that you have not discovered the path to happiness.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we ignore the fact that there will be several witnesses testifying against Vick, I still say it's a bad analogy.
On the one hand, we have a Sergeant, and some people who lived with him asked to use his computer. This is a routine request, and he had no reason to think that his computer would be used to commit massive copyright infringement.
On the other hand, we have Vick, whose cousin asked for a large sum of money. I realize that Michael Vick has a lot of money, but he also probably gets thousands of such requests, so he's got to learn to say no.
To illustrate my point, take a stab at estimating Vick's net worth, and estimate how much that property must have cost and how much it cost to finance the dogfighting league. Next, scale it down (or up, I suppose) to your own net worth to see how meaningful of a request that would be for you. Now if a distant, hoodlum cousin asked you for that much money, would you at least want to know "why?"
My guess is you'd ask an awful lot of questions, and I'm sure Vick did, as well. Or at the very least, asked more questions than the Sergeant asked when someone wanted to use his PC.
mmm.... double standard mmm... donut. Not a double standard, just a really really bad analogy.
Personally, I'm more apt to believe that Vick is guilty because witnesses have come forward and said that he not only bought the property in Virginia for dog fighting purposes, he financed the entire operation. Obviously these witnesses have yet to be cross-examined, so who knows what will come out. He can't claim ignorance, because he attended dogfights. Attending dogfights, of course, is not a crime, but it does mean he knew damn well where his money was going.
For right now, the Sergeant does not have multiple witnesses testifying against him, and Vick does. This is why I am more likely to believe that Vick is guilty.
Ever departed from the Tel Aviv airport? That, my friend, is security. Unfortunately, in the US we have too many air travelers and too few specialists that are capable of conducting the type of interview that you experienced.
Israel is a small country, it has compulsory military service (therefore, many people who are trained in threat detection), and there is very little domestic air travel.
Would you entrust your average TSA screener to perform competently the type of interview you received traveling into and out of Israel?
From your obscure artcile:
Dangan details person's physical characteristics and as well as the family, educational, employment and political background. No, I do not care about an applicant's physical characteristics, family, educational, employment and political background. In fact, it would be bad business practice and illegal for me to factor in most of that while decisioning an application.
If people took better care of their obligations and responsibilities, no screening would be necessary. I hear grumpy old landlords wax nostalgic about how they never used to screen applicants or even use leases. I'm sure you get the same from anyone sufficiently old, but I can tell you for a fact that not screening and not using leases today is a recipe for going broke faster than you would believe.
The fact is, an irresponsible or intentionally destructive tenant can do tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars damage to a property. If you think you can decide who to trust to live in your property better than I can, by all means you should start managing property.
But in the real world of landlording, you have to deal with people who don't care about your property, don't care about their obligations, and anyway don't have any money to cover the damage they cause. Google for "professional tenant" and you'll see what I mean. If you don't believe that a tenant can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, Google for "meth lab cleanup".
I require a criminal background and credit check for all applicants. Not to do so would be financial suicide. You probably think that I'm cruel and heartless for doing so, but you don't know the stakes because you are not the type of person who would be so destructive, and you probably don't know anyone like that. But they are out there, and professional landlords screen them out. Make them somebody else's problem.
Like I said before, I just want to do my best to make sure you'll take care of my property and pay promptly. This'll really get your goat, I do employment/salary verification as well. I want to make sure that you have the income to pay rent so you don't set yourself up for failure. I want the applicant to be a successful tenant just as much as most applicants want to be successful. But there are some bad apples out there that can ruin you. My family has to eat, too.
I am a Landlord.
For instance, a man with a stable job could find himself unable to rent an apartment due to a bad credit report that came about due to simple agency incompetence If you notice errors on your credit report, you have the right to get them corrected. Read the Fair Credit Reporting Act and Fair Debt Collections Act one night when you're having trouble sleeping.
Now that we have that out of the way, let me tell you that credit reports are an essential part of screening rental applicants. The reason you doubt this is that you are used to credit scoring and loan applications. You believe that FICO and its cousins are a worthless predictor of tenant performance, and of course you are right about that. FICO was designed for decisioning unsecured consumer loans, not for rental applications.
On the other hand, credit reports are a treasure trove of information that is useful to landlords. When I'm evaluating an applicant, I don't even look at the credit score. What I'm looking for are:
Public records where you lost a lawsuit against your landlord - If your landlord had to sue you in order to get you to pay rent, or if you bring frivolous lawsuits against your landlords, then you are a headache that I don't want
Collections against you related to housing, especially utilities - If you don't like paying your gas bill in the winter, I'll let you freeze someone else's pipes when the utility cuts you off
A minimum of 12 months of paying your bills on time - Lots of people have terrible credit scores for one reason or another (divorce, medical, etc.), but if you've gotten your life back on track, you pass.
But apparently not being able to borrow money has something to do with being able to pay money one already earns. Oh, you have no idea. I've seen it all. It doesn't matter how much money people make, they have a way to blow it all. My tenants all drive nicer cars than me, have nicer TVs than me, video game consoles, DirecTV, the works. Sure, I could buy those things, but I'd rather buy more property.;)
The point is this: I don't care if you pay Providian or Capital One or whomever gave you the credit you "deserve". As long as you are enlightened enough to know that your housing gets paid before anybody else, then you're good in my book.;)
And you might claim that I am biased when I think that housing payments come first, but when have you ever stiffed your landlord or mortgage lender? Never, of course, because you don't want to get kicked out onto the street.
1. [...] anytime any company wants to extend you credit, they have to call the phone number associated with the fraud alert This is mostly false. The fraud alert is simply an advisory inserted into the credit report, and it is totally up to the creditor if he wants to call the number on it and verify. Some credit report interfaces don't even display the fraud alert. For instance, one time I was opening a bank account and they pulled my credit, but the interface never brought up my fraud alert.
2. Alternatively, or in addition, pay Equifax their extortion money of $130/year for their 3-in-1 monitoring. Any activity on your credit file at any of the big three credit agencies causes an e-mail to be sent to you. Account creations are sent within a day or two. But balance changes on existing accounts are sent only once per month Balance information is only reported to the bureaus once per month, so it's hard to ask them to do any better for you.;) Anyhow, I do not see a huge value in a service such as this. It cannot prevent ID theft--it can only help you catch it early. But what good does that do? Call your local police department and ask them what there procedure is for ID theft cases. It usually consists of: 1) take report, 2) file it, 3) there is no step 3. You can pull your credit for free 3 times per year. This is good enough, IMO.
3. For brokerage accounts, get two-factor authorization (i.e. an RSA SecureID token). It's often free, depending upon your balance. Which brokers offer this service? Mine does not.
4. Pay in cash at restaurants, and as much as possible elsewhere. Overrated. You are not liable for unauthorized use of your credit card. Disputing charges takes 3 seconds.
5. Use TrueCrypt for electronic documents. Can you give me an example? What is this supposed to accomplish?
6. Use a locking file cabinet (keeps guests out, even though it's worthless against burglars). What kind of company do you keep? With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Neither is "People who live in Cabrini Green," but you may get into trouble if you discriminate based on that. Why would I get into trouble? The seven federally-protected classes are:
race
color
national origin
religion
sex
familial status
handicap
If you'd like to explain to me how not renting to people who live in Cabrini Green discriminates against one of those protected classes, I'd be all ears.
Before you answer, I'd like to remind you that membership in a protected class does not mandate that an applicant must be accepted. It merely states that an applicant cannot be denied because of his or her membership in a protected class. In other words, I can reject a black applicant, but I cannot reject an applicant for being black.
Along those lines, if I have a policy to reject everybody from Cabrini Green no matter what race or color they are, my policy is legal.
I am a Landlord, so I've been involved in plenty of small claims court type situations like this.
Imagine if your neighbor threw a baseball through your window because he was sick of hearing loud music coming from your house. You take him to court and claim $10,000 worth of damage. Normally, you could be a dick and just carry on suing him because you want to make him pay his legal expenses as extra punishment and see how large of a settlement you can score. This is generally not the case. In simple property damage disputes like this, the actual damages are easily quantifiable. You don't get to just sue for whatever arbitrarily large number you feel like writing down.
When I take a tenant to court who has damaged my property, the judge asks me to show what the actual damage was (show receipts), and demonstrate that the tenant is responsible for the damage. For a broken window, I bring in my receipts for $150 for the window and $25 for my guy to pop it in.
If, instead of suing for actual damages in SCC, I were to sue for $10,000.00 in circuit court, I doubt the judge would react too favorably. He'd want to know why this small claims matter was clogging up his docket. I would not want to be the plaintiff in such a case.
As far as I can tell, you can be denied employment for a non-sensitive position that doesn't involve finance, regardless of a lack of an criminal history or civil rulings, based entirely on your credit report. Of course you can. "People With Bad Credit" are not a protected class.
The gov't supposedly has to tell you if you are rejected for employment or a promotion, but somehow I doubt that always happens--as there appears to be limited oversight. Actually, it is not the government, but the entity who is relying on credit bureau information who is responsible for notifying you if you were denied credit/employment/housing/whatever in whole or in part based on your credit report. The Fair Credit Reporting Act mandates this reporting, and the penalties are pretty harsh, especially in relationship to the ease of this notification.
I am a landlord, and I always notify applicants if I reject based on their credit report. It's just a form letter that I drop in the mail. No biggie.
I recall a university in NC having a position paper stating that credit based hiring may represent a system of discrimination against minorities that is illegal (this is highly likely, but a test case might be hard to find and argue). I do not know about hiring, but it has been tested over and over that relying on credit bureau information is not discrimination under the federal Fair Housing Act. People with bad credit are not a protected class.
How does a civil judgement go into my Credit Report? Does paying $300 by cash/bankers pay order make the judgement enter my credit report??? Civil judgments are supposed to appear on your credit report in the "Public Records" section. It's not a perfect science, however. Not all civil judgments have a SSN attached, and not all counties' judgments are picked up efficiently by the credit bureaus, but they are supposed to be.
If that is the case then all the traffic fines for no-parking, etc., would be in my credit file that is now idling in my hands. That is incorrect. Traffic fines are criminal, not civil judgments. It may not seem like it in traffic court, but the prosecutor actually is supposed to prove his case beyond reasonable doubt, you can go to jail if you're convicted--the whole nine yards. When you are convicted, that is a criminal conviction (generally a misdemeanor). Criminal convictions do not normally appear on a credit report.
Civil judgments are what appears on a credit report. When a tenant doesn't pay rent, and I get a civil judgment against them, that goes on their credit report and it dings their FICO about 150-175 points. If they pay it, the hit gets reduced to about 100-125 points.
In contrast, your overdue credit card is probably causing you about a 50-75 point drop in score.
The mere presence of the word "Viagra" in an email does not make it SPAM. Ever hear of a urologist? I'm willing to bet that urologists discuss Viagra over email all the time. For fun, I created an email message that I sent to myself to see what SpamAssassin scored it:
Subject: Interesting phenomenon related to Viagra use
Hi, Dr. Smith-
I just wanted to write you to let you know that I really enjoyed the article you wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine about the side effects of Cialis, Viagra, and Levitra. It turns out a patient of mine experienced debilitating nausea while on Levitra, so I prescribed Viagra in its place, as you recommend.
In addition, I thought you might be interested to know that this patient suffers from Raynaud's disease, and he reported a 50% reduction in the frequency of his attacks after switching from Levitra to Viagra. Curious, I found an article in PubMed detailing this phenomenon and I thought I'd pass it along to you.
I hope your knee is healing up nicely, I'm sure you can't wait to get back on the tennis court.
Best Regards, Dr. Gerald Jones SpamAssassin scored it -0.9, which is what I would expect. This is despite the "DRUGS_ERECTILE" rule firing.
The spam filter that you would design would reject the message, and that would be an obvious false positive.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, once you've got the attention of the hottie du jour, you're probably not going to want to take her to the local meat market, I mean, bar. You won't be able to hear each other, she's going to get hit on incessantly, and that will not help your confidence. I used to have a canned first date that worked like a charm. It started at a local comedy club. Chicks like to laugh, and if you go to a comedy club (before you tell me how lame this is, remember it was years ago), you can make her laugh without even having a sense of humor. And since it's improv, you have 800 topics of conversation at your fingertips for the rest of the night. Hint: pick the dirty ones.
The secret to chicks: confidence. There is a fine line between ego and confidence. Cross it every once in a while.
The secret to hot chicks: stand out. They get hit on every minute of every day by the very "frat boys" you deplore. You're not one of them. Don't try to be one, because even if you succeed, you will be just another "frat boy" to be cycled and recycled through. Many of these girls, do not "date", they "hang out", and run through a lot of guys. And it's little wonder why. After a while, all guys start to look the same when you're getting hit on all day long.
Chasing tail is a lot like applying to ivy league schools. Because they get so many applicants, your acceptance and rejection comes across as totally arbitrary, so you had better apply to a dozen schools. You just never know what a particular girl will be into, so it pays to shop around. I am not going to spend all my money on "floozies", I know how to manage and save my money now (I have a retirement account that I started myself when I was 17). Knowing how to manage your money is a great life skill, and you should be commended for your responsibility. The gold-diggers you have your sights set on will probably be less impressed by your Roth IRA balance, however. Surprisingly few of them have the patience to wait until age 59 1/2 to get their hands on your money.
Also, remember that being rich is less important now than it was years ago. Chicks have their own money and no longer need yours. I know a lot of women (my age, granted) who make six figure salaries. What kind of cash do you intend to impress them with?
In retrospect, I had a great time in college and a great time in high school. Don't bide your time until you graduate--the game only moves up to the next level. Figure out how to make it work today. You have nothing to lose.
Go make some memories so you'll have something to get all nostalgic about when you're old like me.
P.S. Do not bitch about how difficult it is to date in college/high school/the workplace/whatever. Girls really, really hate that--it is the exact opposite of confidence.
Good luck!
Be that as it may, if you approach in terms of possibilities instead of probabilities, you just become a hypochondriac recluse who will be driven to insanity.
"There is the possibility that I will have a heart attack if I don't exercise."
"There is the possibility that I will break my neck if I exercise."
"There is the possibility that I choke on my food if I eat."
"There is the possibility that I get hit by a car if I cross the street."
"There is the possibility that I get struck by lightning if I go outside."
I could go on forever. There is always the possibility that something dreadful is going to befall you. You have to just let it go or you will be paralyzed.
Remember, even if the condom does split, your chances of HIV infection are 1/300 that the girl is HIV+ and 1/1000 that an HIV+ girl can transmit it to a guy. You are going to have to have a hell of a lot of unprotected sex before you get HIV.
Armchair Psychologist says: you have difficulty connecting with people, especially intimately, because of your Asperger's. Social isolation feels more natural to you. The "reasons" that you give for sexual abstention... are they not more like "consolations"?
In all my years of having sex, I have never had a condom split. Somebody must be doing something wrong.
Now let's analyze this attitude. A full 1 million Americans are HIV+ out of a population of 302 million. So there is a 1 in 300 chance that that hot chick you picked up at the bar is HIV+, give or take.
The chance of an HIV+ woman infecting a man through one act of unprotected sex is between 0.1% and 1%. The 1% figure is for men with genital lacerations. Let's take a rate of 0.5%.
Condoms are known to block HIV transmission. The average breakage/slippage rate for condoms is a whopping 4.6% (hello, people! Learn to use the tools!).
Ok. So let's say you pick up a chick at the bar and go home and have protected sex. You are two orders of magnitude more likely to get killed by a car while walking to her house than you are to contract HIV from her.
Hope that helps put things into perspective.
Would your parents actually cut you off if they discovered that you were sexually active while in college?
As a parent, I find that to be a little scary.
- Chicks may dig money, but plenty of guys have more money and less ego than you.
- If you spend all of your money on floozies, you will have no money left with which to attract these "money-grubbing whores" you seek. Once they spend your money, why should they hang around?
Moral of the story, smart, rich guys get all the hotties when it matters, so just wait until you are making a good living and the dumb-ass frat boys are stuck in cube-ville with their bullshit degrees. I think that you'll find this not to be true. In addition, I think you will find that you have not discovered the path to happiness.Good luck!
Eh. Different people have different libidos. Film at 11. Hell, some people even have zero sex drive.
;)
I have to admit, however, that I found it ironic to be told to "get a life" by someone who couldn't get laid until age 26.
Thanks for the clarification.
I still say it's bad.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we ignore the fact that there will be several witnesses testifying against Vick, I still say it's a bad analogy.
On the one hand, we have a Sergeant, and some people who lived with him asked to use his computer. This is a routine request, and he had no reason to think that his computer would be used to commit massive copyright infringement.
On the other hand, we have Vick, whose cousin asked for a large sum of money. I realize that Michael Vick has a lot of money, but he also probably gets thousands of such requests, so he's got to learn to say no.
To illustrate my point, take a stab at estimating Vick's net worth, and estimate how much that property must have cost and how much it cost to finance the dogfighting league. Next, scale it down (or up, I suppose) to your own net worth to see how meaningful of a request that would be for you. Now if a distant, hoodlum cousin asked you for that much money, would you at least want to know "why?"
My guess is you'd ask an awful lot of questions, and I'm sure Vick did, as well. Or at the very least, asked more questions than the Sergeant asked when someone wanted to use his PC.
Personally, I'm more apt to believe that Vick is guilty because witnesses have come forward and said that he not only bought the property in Virginia for dog fighting purposes, he financed the entire operation. Obviously these witnesses have yet to be cross-examined, so who knows what will come out. He can't claim ignorance, because he attended dogfights. Attending dogfights, of course, is not a crime, but it does mean he knew damn well where his money was going.
For right now, the Sergeant does not have multiple witnesses testifying against him, and Vick does. This is why I am more likely to believe that Vick is guilty.
Israel is a small country, it has compulsory military service (therefore, many people who are trained in threat detection), and there is very little domestic air travel.
Would you entrust your average TSA screener to perform competently the type of interview you received traveling into and out of Israel?
Is there some reason that Firefox thought it was a good idea to automatically populate passwords for the user?
It just seems to me like better design to require some sort of user interaction before coughing up a password.
If people took better care of their obligations and responsibilities, no screening would be necessary. I hear grumpy old landlords wax nostalgic about how they never used to screen applicants or even use leases. I'm sure you get the same from anyone sufficiently old, but I can tell you for a fact that not screening and not using leases today is a recipe for going broke faster than you would believe.
The fact is, an irresponsible or intentionally destructive tenant can do tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars damage to a property. If you think you can decide who to trust to live in your property better than I can, by all means you should start managing property.
But in the real world of landlording, you have to deal with people who don't care about your property, don't care about their obligations, and anyway don't have any money to cover the damage they cause. Google for "professional tenant" and you'll see what I mean. If you don't believe that a tenant can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, Google for "meth lab cleanup".
I require a criminal background and credit check for all applicants. Not to do so would be financial suicide. You probably think that I'm cruel and heartless for doing so, but you don't know the stakes because you are not the type of person who would be so destructive, and you probably don't know anyone like that. But they are out there, and professional landlords screen them out. Make them somebody else's problem.
Like I said before, I just want to do my best to make sure you'll take care of my property and pay promptly. This'll really get your goat, I do employment/salary verification as well. I want to make sure that you have the income to pay rent so you don't set yourself up for failure. I want the applicant to be a successful tenant just as much as most applicants want to be successful. But there are some bad apples out there that can ruin you. My family has to eat, too.
Thanks for the tip.
Now that we have that out of the way, let me tell you that credit reports are an essential part of screening rental applicants. The reason you doubt this is that you are used to credit scoring and loan applications. You believe that FICO and its cousins are a worthless predictor of tenant performance, and of course you are right about that. FICO was designed for decisioning unsecured consumer loans, not for rental applications.
On the other hand, credit reports are a treasure trove of information that is useful to landlords. When I'm evaluating an applicant, I don't even look at the credit score. What I'm looking for are:
- Public records where you lost a lawsuit against your landlord - If your landlord had to sue you in order to get you to pay rent, or if you bring frivolous lawsuits against your landlords, then you are a headache that I don't want
- Collections against you related to housing, especially utilities - If you don't like paying your gas bill in the winter, I'll let you freeze someone else's pipes when the utility cuts you off
- A minimum of 12 months of paying your bills on time - Lots of people have terrible credit scores for one reason or another (divorce, medical, etc.), but if you've gotten your life back on track, you pass.
But apparently not being able to borrow money has something to do with being able to pay money one already earns. Oh, you have no idea. I've seen it all. It doesn't matter how much money people make, they have a way to blow it all. My tenants all drive nicer cars than me, have nicer TVs than me, video game consoles, DirecTV, the works. Sure, I could buy those things, but I'd rather buy more property.The point is this: I don't care if you pay Providian or Capital One or whomever gave you the credit you "deserve". As long as you are enlightened enough to know that your housing gets paid before anybody else, then you're good in my book.
And you might claim that I am biased when I think that housing payments come first, but when have you ever stiffed your landlord or mortgage lender? Never, of course, because you don't want to get kicked out onto the street.
Average Call Time.
As soon as a Level 1 hears the name of another company, your call is terminated.
Like I said, if I reject anyone from that neighborhood no matter what their race/color is, I'm in the clear.
- race
- color
- national origin
- religion
- sex
- familial status
- handicap
If you'd like to explain to me how not renting to people who live in Cabrini Green discriminates against one of those protected classes, I'd be all ears.Before you answer, I'd like to remind you that membership in a protected class does not mandate that an applicant must be accepted. It merely states that an applicant cannot be denied because of his or her membership in a protected class. In other words, I can reject a black applicant, but I cannot reject an applicant for being black.
Along those lines, if I have a policy to reject everybody from Cabrini Green no matter what race or color they are, my policy is legal.
When I take a tenant to court who has damaged my property, the judge asks me to show what the actual damage was (show receipts), and demonstrate that the tenant is responsible for the damage. For a broken window, I bring in my receipts for $150 for the window and $25 for my guy to pop it in.
If, instead of suing for actual damages in SCC, I were to sue for $10,000.00 in circuit court, I doubt the judge would react too favorably. He'd want to know why this small claims matter was clogging up his docket. I would not want to be the plaintiff in such a case.
I am a landlord, and I always notify applicants if I reject based on their credit report. It's just a form letter that I drop in the mail. No biggie. I recall a university in NC having a position paper stating that credit based hiring may represent a system of discrimination against minorities that is illegal (this is highly likely, but a test case might be hard to find and argue). I do not know about hiring, but it has been tested over and over that relying on credit bureau information is not discrimination under the federal Fair Housing Act. People with bad credit are not a protected class.
Good luck!
Civil judgments are what appears on a credit report. When a tenant doesn't pay rent, and I get a civil judgment against them, that goes on their credit report and it dings their FICO about 150-175 points. If they pay it, the hit gets reduced to about 100-125 points.
In contrast, your overdue credit card is probably causing you about a 50-75 point drop in score.
Hi, Dr. Smith-
I just wanted to write you to let you know that I really enjoyed the article you wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine about the side effects of Cialis, Viagra, and Levitra. It turns out a patient of mine experienced debilitating nausea while on Levitra, so I prescribed Viagra in its place, as you recommend.
In addition, I thought you might be interested to know that this patient suffers from Raynaud's disease, and he reported a 50% reduction in the frequency of his attacks after switching from Levitra to Viagra. Curious, I found an article in PubMed detailing this phenomenon and I thought I'd pass it along to you.
I hope your knee is healing up nicely, I'm sure you can't wait to get back on the tennis court.
Best Regards,
Dr. Gerald Jones SpamAssassin scored it -0.9, which is what I would expect. This is despite the "DRUGS_ERECTILE" rule firing.
The spam filter that you would design would reject the message, and that would be an obvious false positive.
Better luck next time, my friend.