I am so so so so so so pissed at my old apartment complex. BF and I both got a call from a collections agency today about an overdue bill we didn't even know existed for $930!!! Apparently our apt complex decided to charge us for carpet cleaning, cleaning the apartment, and utilities. I am soooo pissed off for so many reasons!
1. I sweated my ass off cleaning every nook and cranny of that apartment from top to bottom. It took me days because I went over on my lunch break and spent some evenings there after we moved everything out. I don't even know how many times I walked through that apartment picking up little bits of lint that I spotted or vaccuuming back over the footprints I left so that it would look completely untouched. We lived there for less than a year and didn't own or bring any animals into that apartment so I can't even imagine how they felt it needed cleaning. Hell, I had to fucking clean that apartment a second time after we initially moved in because they had done such a shitty job of it.
2. They are charging us for fucking utilities!! This makes ZERO sense to me! Why you ask? Because all of our fucking bills were either included as part of our monthly rent or paid separately directly to the fucking supplier! Internet we paid to the internet company for the month ahead. We paid our power bill directly to the power company. We received our last power bill earlier this month and it has also been paid. Our water/sewer/trash were paid as part of our monthly rent so that was also paid up for the entire last month that we were residing there. There is seriously NO utility they could be charging us for...
3. Carpet cleaning? WTF??? I could maayyybeeee stretch it and say yeah...they could within reason charge us to clean the carpet just because it's something they do as a standard but there is nothing in our lease saying carpet cleaning charges are required and secondly, the carpet was coming apart all over the place when we moved in. It was definitely old and needed to be replaced. There were 2 dime sized spots in the master bedroom but still...the only reasonable charge I could see here would be for $100 or $150.
I am just so angry. This is just the cherry on top of all the other shit we put up with for the 11 months we lived there. We have no invoice with an inventory of what we're being charged for although they say they are emailng us one today. I don't believe them...everything they ever "promised" or said they would do never even happened. They never attempted to even reach out to us regarding a past due invoice. They have our new address because they confirmed it with me in person when I returned our keys and gate cards in June. I even saw that they had a copy of our written 60 day notice with the associated official form that provided them with our new address and they still got it wrong!!!! I have no idea where the original invoice went. The idiots probably taped it to the door of the apartment we were no longer residing in and when it didn't get paid just forwarded it along to the collections agency. And the collections agency had our apartment address as their point of contact so we never even received their letter that they supposedly sent earlier this month regarding our "past due" bill. We set up mail forwarding to be effective for our new place back in June but honestly I think USPS is untrustworthy with mail forwarding and it takes extra time for forwarded mail to arrive at your new address anyway. So today is literally the first we've heard that we had to pay ANY charges whatsoever. And they basically told us if we don't pay up now then they are going to hit our credit scores with a late payment. Both of us have excellent credit so this would probably be devasting and I have zero idea how long it would affect my credit score.
I'm just really mad and upset right now. All I want to do is go home and down a bottle of wine and forget about everything.