Kyle Hepp

November 15, 2008

Well, we haven’t been sued yet. This guy seems to be all talk. S. had a meeting in the morning with the guy on Thursday, and then he was supposed to go meet with our lawyer and we were going to go back in the afternoon to meet with the landlord again with our lawyer. Well, our lawyer’s dad got run over by a motorcycle that afternoon.

Sidenote: I know a frightening amount of people that have been run over lately. BE CAREFUL crossing the street. Sure, it sounds like common sense, but tell that to the people getting peeled off the pavement on a daily basis in Santiago.

Our lawyer is also a friend. He’s the Chilean husband of another gringa (Australian/Brit gringa) I hang out with regularly, so I was less concerned that we had lost our brilliant legal mind, and just overall more worried for their family when we got the news. Anyways, thank god our lawyer’s dad is going to be ok.

So this mean that we went back to the meeting with the lawyer in the afternoon with no other legal knowledge than what we had already known in the morning. The landlord took our coming back with no lawyer as a sign that we were bluffing and continued to try and extort us into leaving him with checks for three more months worth of rent, and threatening to sue if S. didn’t sign a document there on the spot.

Mark my words, he’s the one bluffing. I am feeling confident that he won’t sue. And if he does, we’ll win. Simple as that. There’s no way he’d get the six months rent he keeps saying he’ll sue us for. The contract is only ambiguous with regards to one month, and I doubt it’s worth his time to sue for that, plus, our lawyer says that the law is definitely on our side and this guy doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

I half want him to sue us just so we can beat this jackass. Come Monday we’ll find out what happens.

7 Comments

November 13, 2008

After two days in a row of being this pissed off, I’m surprised I haven’t dropped dead of an anger heart attack yet. Yesterday taxes, now today, court.

Yes, you heard that right. We may end up in a legal battle with our former landlord. The contract states we could terminate at any time with 30 days notice via email. So we did. Not so fast. He called to tell us that we understood the contract wrong and that we were actually bound through December and that we have to give 60 days notice via notarized letter and since we haven’t done that yet, then technically our contract renews for another 6 months and we need to pay through July. He also threatened S. when S. called to tell him that wasn’t right and we followed what the contract says to the letter by giving 30 days notice via email.

So S. went and consulted with a laywer friend. It turns out that the contract says both things, what we think it says and what the landlord thinks it says. It’s ambiguous says our lawyer friend, but in Chile laws heavily favor renters, not landlords, and Chilean law says the way any ambiguity is interpreted is the person who drew up the contract’s responsibility, or in this case, the landlord’s.

Our lease was paid on the 6th of every month. So on October 6 we paid in full for the month of October 6th-November 6th. We gave our 30 days notice on October 23rd, meaning that we would still owe the guy rent from November 6th-23rd, or basically a little over a half a month’s rent. But, since nothing was resolved we did pay rent for November 6th-December 6th, meaning we overpaid what we owed.

S. went in today to see if we could come to some kind of agreement with him. We offered to let him keep the extra half month’s rent, as well as tell him that we’ll clean the old apartment and give him the keys today, even though we’ve paid to live there through December 6th, that way he can find other renters.

The guy said, “No, that doesn’t work for me. Here’s a new contract, sign it. It holds you responsible for 3 more months rent and all related expenses. You need to pay that now or at least leave checks for three months worth of rent. However, if I find another renter, I’ll refund you the three months rent.”

S. responded by telling him politely that he was going to talk with his lawyer but right now he absolutely wasn’t going to sign anything. The guy FREAKED OUT and shouted, “NO, you can’t leave unless you sign.” S. was like, “I’m sorry, but absolutely not. First of all, we’re talking to our lawyer because if you don’t uphold your end of the contract we’re taking this to court. And second of all, even if I do decide to agree to to your terms, I’m not signing another contract with you that I think says one thing and you decide means something completely different. How do we know you’ll actually give us our money back. At this point you’re already breaking what our old contract said, there’s no way we’re leaving you with more money in the hopes that you’ll ‘refund it.’”

Then the guy started threatening, and get this, told him that under NO CIRCUMSTANCES were we allowed to remove anything from our apartment. He goes, “Don’t even think about moving that refrigerator.”

Ummm, yeah, about that. A. Nowhere in our contract did we sign anything that says, “We’re your bitches,” and B. HAHA, we already moved. There’s not a damn thing in our apartment and today we’re going to get our bikes out of the storage space belonging to that apartment too, so he can’t go in and change the locks or do something crazy.

I’m freaking out. I don’t want to go to court whether we’re in the right or wrong.

15 Comments

November 11, 2008

For the past couple weeks I was pretty stressed out. My dad left me to babysit the company while he traveled for almost the entire month. Moving is never fun. I started blogging at a new site and was wondering if I would be able to keep up for a while. I was behind on photo editing for clients.

But, now in the past week, I’ve felt like things are really under control. Everything has calmed down a little bit and the fact that we’re all settled down in our new house has definitely helped. I was feeling good.

That is, until two seconds ago when I started doing some calculations and realized that I am on the verge of being bumped up into the next tax bracket. In essence, if I make just $1,790 dollars before the end of the year I’m FUCKED. Because of having to pay a high percentage in the next bracket, but being on the very low end of that bracket, when all is said and done I’ll have less money in my pocket then if I stopped writing from now until the end of the month to keep me in the lower bracket, even though I will have earned more. I’m so pissed off. I’m going to owe like 5k more.

My stress levels are back through the roof. Just three hours ago I was lollygagging at the pool, enjoying a sunny afternoon. Now all of a sudden I’m freaking out and trying to figure out if there’s any way I can just NOT work for the next month and a half without pissing any of 5 bosses off….yeaaaah, not going to happen. The other option is work like an insane freak and never sleep for a month and a half, to make even more than normal and offset the tax cost, but I would have to be a MACHINE to do that. ARGH, I don’t know what to do and I’m never going to be able to sleep tonight.

Ps. Sorry for so much SHOUTING in this post. I know it’s not good blog etiquette. I’m just really worked up and can’t contain myself. I can’t just pull 5k out of my ass!!!!

23 Comments