Mr. Dale doesn't email. On January 2 he knocked on our storm door at nine in the morning, in his canvas work coat with a pencil behind his ear, and handed me an envelope. "Lease stuff," he said. "Read it and holler if you've got questions." Then he walked next door to hand Gloria hers.
The letter was one paragraph. Starting February 1, our rent goes from $725 to $760 a month. His property taxes and the insurance on the building both went up, and he's passing some of it along.
I'll be fair to him. We moved into our side of the duplex in January 2022, and he hasn't raised the rent once in four years. $35 on $725 is about a 4.8 percent increase. Kayla's rent in Columbia went up more than that last year, and nobody knocked on her door to explain why.
Still, $35 a month is $420 a year, and every one of those dollars could go toward a house. So before we signed, we did the math on moving.
What else is out there
I spent two evenings on the Facebook rental groups and one Saturday driving around town looking for signs. In a town of 5,000, that doesn't take long. I found three two-bedroom places.
The cheapest was an apartment for $695. No dogs over 30 pounds. Moose is 70, so that was the end of that one.
Next was a duplex a lot like ours for $775, with no fence. Paying $15 more to walk Moose on a leash four times a day didn't make any sense.
The last was a little house on the north side for $850 with a fenced yard. Dogs allowed, with a $300 pet deposit and $25 a month in pet rent. That was the only one we'd really consider.
What moving would really have cost
Here's what it would have taken to get into that house, before we unpacked a single box:
| One-time cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Pet deposit | $300 |
| Two application fees | $80 |
| Moving truck and gas | $150 |
| Internet install at the new place | $50 |
| A day off work for each of us | $330 |
| Pizza and gas money for my dad and his trailer | $45 |
| Total | $955 |
That doesn't even count the security deposit. We'd get our $725 back from Mr. Dale eventually, but we'd have to put down $850 at the new place first.
Then the monthly part. $850 plus $25 in pet rent is $875, which is $115 more than Mr. Dale's new $760. Over a year, that's $1,380.
The one number I couldn't pin down was utilities. The little house has a gas furnace, so there'd be a gas bill on top of a smaller electric bill, and the owner couldn't tell me what the last tenants paid. I left it out of the math completely, which probably makes moving look a little better than it really was.
So the choice was: stay and pay $420 more this year, or move and pay $955 up front plus $1,380 more over the year. That's $2,335 against $420. It didn't take long.
Why we signed again
Money was the big reason, but not the only one. Mr. Dale is slow, but he shows up, and he paid for our new door sweep last summer. The fence is already there for Moose. Gloria watches our place when we're gone. And we're hoping to buy a house by the end of this year, so moving now would mean moving twice in one year.
Before we signed, I asked Mr. Dale the question that worried me: what happens if we find a house in the middle of the lease? He thought about it, then wrote on the bottom of the lease in pen: 60 days' notice, we help him show the place, no penalty. All three of us initialed it. I don't know how that would hold up in a courtroom, but I know Mr. Dale, and his initials mean something.
Where the $35 comes from
This part worked out better than I expected. Starting this month, I'm on Tyler's health plan instead of my own, which saves us about $52 a month, and that $52 already has a job: it rides along with the transfer to the house fund on the 21st. The extra $35 comes out of what's left in checking at the end of the month, and my yearly raise in February should cover most of it. So the sheet barely changes. The rent line goes from $725 to $760, and the house fund still gets what it was getting.
