My roommate and I (both women in our mid-twenties) lived together for three years. It was great the first couple of years, but this past year has been a nightmare.
In 2020, when [Roommate] was moving in, she talked me out of putting her on the lease. Honestly, I should’ve said no to her moving in just for that, but at the time, we were best friends, and I thought I could trust her.
At the beginning of 2023, [Roommate] went to some classes and met a guy there. They had a thing together, but there was a rule set in place stating you couldn’t date within the class. They decided to date on the down-low anyway, and then they got scared that they were going to get caught, so they ended things a couple of months into it.
Fast-forward to the time when they both graduated from this class. [Guy] had a new girlfriend who attended. [Roommate] was infuriated by this and kept saying he was doing it to get at her. Really, he had just gotten a new girlfriend, and she couldn’t cope with that.
Fast-forward a little bit more. [Roommate] and [Guy] continued to hang out behind his girlfriend’s back. It got to the point where they were drinking together one night at a bar, and on the way home, [Guy] got pulled over and got a DUI.
This is where it started affecting me. [Roommate] owed me rent right around the time this was going down. And instead of giving me rent, she spent $1,000 bailing [Guy] out so his girlfriend wouldn’t find out. I confronted [Roommate] about not paying rent.
Roommate: “You’re just throwing my mistakes back in my face!”
She never ended up paying me back for rent.
Then, [Roommate] got in a wreck at some point and still owed quite a bit on her totaled car. She had GAP (Guaranteed Asset Protection) insurance, but it was taking a while to go through. Instead of waiting, she decided to get into another car payment before the insurance company paid off her other car, so she was paying on both cars and still struggling to pay me rent. I said something about it to her.
Roommate: “But I need a car!”
Me: “You could ask your dad to use his since he works from home, and he uses your mom’s car most of the time, anyway.”
She got really mad over this and flipped out about how I thought she was privileged or whatever.
At some point while we were arguing, she suggested moving out.
Me: “Okay. The lease is up in a few months. We can revisit this then and see if anything has changed.”
She liked that, so we stayed until the end of the lease, and then we both decided this wasn’t working and to go our separate ways. [Roommate] told me she’d found an apartment in the same complex.
She also kept asking to get a dog this past year, and I kept saying no because I didn’t think she could afford it, and I wasn’t going to pay for her to get a dog to tear the place up more. A couple of days before her move-out date, [Roommate] posted on her Snapchat story that she had gotten a dog. She didn’t even tell me that she had this giant pitbull in the middle of our tiny apartment when I went to move some more of my stuff out. That infuriated me; she really couldn’t wait two more days or warn me about the dog?
I told her what we needed to replace to get my deposit back, to which she replied over and over again:
Roommate: “That’s what the security deposit is for!”
Since she moved in, she ruined all of the blinds somehow, broke my bedroom window by breaking in a couple of times when she locked herself out, tore up the floor in the kitchen and the entry moving the dryer in, tore up the washroom door because “it was in the way”, poked several holes in the walls hanging things, and so much more.
When she finally moved out, I went to clean the place up a bit and spent four hours alone cleaning trash out of her room and cleaning out the fridge, which she left packed full of gross food. I also spent a whole day scrubbing the tub, which she left full of gunk, and scrubbing all of the other surfaces. (I say “she” alone because it was getting so hard to live with her that I basically stayed with my boyfriend for most of this past year.)
I was going to put all of this behind me and move on, but I got a bill in the mail from our old apartment for $1,776.08, and my security deposit covered $820. So, I texted [Roommate].
Me: “They sent me a bill for $956.08. Are you able to send half?”
She replied with a bunch of questions asking everything they charged us for, and I answered and sent pictures of the documents with receipts for everything. I knew in my gut that she wasn’t gonna pay anything, but she straight-up said:
Roommate: “Okay, so, looking at what all the deposit covered, it looks like damages and cleaning expenses, other than the vinyl repair, which was $520.86. I don’t feel like I am responsible for the utility fee or the carpet cleaning because that was on the lease as your responsibility. You also told me you were going to get the carpets cleaned. So, I’m willing to send half of the $520.86 for the vinyl replacement. I don’t feel like I am responsible beyond that.”
Basically, she was saying, “Screw you,” to me because her name wasn’t on the lease. I also never told her I would get the carpets cleaned; I asked her to do it and she said, “That’s what the security deposits for.”
She sent me $260 and that’s it for all of this. She moved in after I was already living there, so that security deposit was mine alone, and it’s very frustrating that she just straight-up didn’t care about ruining this whole friendship over this.
After she sent that, I felt defeated, thinking I couldn’t do anything about it. Then, I remembered that we had a phone plan together. I looked up how much I owed on my phone; it was $400. In the policy, it said that if you cancel, you’re still responsible for any fees on the phone. So, I called them, canceled it, made sure to remove my card information and my autopay, and told them to bill [Roommate] for it. Since it was under her name and she doesn’t care, why should I? And that ensures that she can’t contact me anymore, either.
