By the beach.
Imagine 6 months after you have vacated a furnished rental, you get a call from the landlord of the previous furnished rental.
You’re surprised. You’re not sure why he is calling you so long after your have vacated the furnished rental. You spend a few minutes with small talk, and then he gets to the point, “Hey listen, did you drink all of the alcohol in the unit?”.
I knew exactly what he was referring to. In the unit I had rented, there was an entire cabinet full of alcohol. Exotic stuff, stuff from all over the world. Expensive stuff. The owner of the rental clearly enjoyed a cocktail or two with nothing but the best. I would imagine there was $1,000 to $1,500 worth of booze in the cabinet.
I rarely drink. If I do, it is generally a few corona lights dressed up with a lime and a little salt.
So I answered, “No, sorry. I didn’t touch any of it.”. Luckily for me, that was the end of it. Apparently the landlord had enough proof that the current tenant was the culprit.
A sticky situation.
As I reflected on the situation, I realized that it could have gone far worse because I remember being given an inventory checklist prior to moving in the rental which I opted not to fill out. And since I opted not to fill that out, there was nothing to compare to on the day that I moved out. I saw very clearly that the landlord could have held me accountable for the booze because I had failed to complete the inventory checklist that would have proved that I did not drink the booze.
Whenever I move out of a furnished rental, I always take pictures of everything. When I say everything, I mean everything in open spaces. But since the booze was inside of a cabinet, I did not have a picture of it.
How long would have the inventory checklist taken me to fill out? All of maybe 5 minutes?
Even if I live in 10 furnished rentals and spend 5 minutes each time, that’s really only 50 minutes of my time. And while I came out of the situation described above unscathed, I would have gladly spent an hour doing inventory to avoid a $1,500 undeserved bill.
All you have to do is take a few seconds to think of all the potential things that could happen like the one above if you don’t fill out the inventory checklist, and it makes it very clear that the most important thing to fill out when moving into a furnished rental is the inventory checklist.
I won’t be making that mistake again.