My landlord partnered with a financing company - I can pay $15/month for the luxury of making weekly payments on my rent

after looking at their site....oh fuck no.

they offer lines of credit to pay your rent. but you have to pay back said credit by the end of the month so....why? If you're having trouble paying your rent getting a line of credit to cover it and then having to pay back said credit by the end of the month on top of a percentage AND membership fee it just sounds exactly like a payday loan where you KNOW they hope you roll over so you'll never be able to catch up.

They now have “freedom” to abuse their customers.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/11/trump-administration-declares-cfpb-funding-illegal-00646354
I’m sure you’ll feel that warm wet trickling down any day now
- I expect a judge ruling or something to hopefully come in and put a stop to that. Like having to force the SNAP benefits thing to be funded.
  Anything this administration touches, turns to rigor mortis.
Innovation! They cut out the middle man and let's you get screwed by just your landlord instead of the landlord and Copperhawks.
The US loves their useless, expensive middlemen.
- hence their "healthcare"
Landlord's brother probably runs the loan place.
If you're not struggling financially, but need to build credit maybe?

$15 plus 1% of rent plus card processing fees.

If your rent is $1200 and there's a 3.5% processing fee, you're looking at $70/month in extra fees.

Move. Into the streets of needed. Say no to insane bullshit
- no

When you're rich everything is free and when you're broke it costs a lot.

yup. It's fucking expensive being poor :/

This is clownshit.

Can he force you to enter a contract with them? Sounds illegal.

No, I still have the option of paying it all at once without going through this finance company. But they’ve been spamming my email letting me know about the “new payment option.”
- That's when you reply to the company and tell them that you find their policies rather predatory and not too dissimilar from low-class "payday loan" companies and that you want them to remove you from their mailing list and you will from now on mark any emails from them as spam, and sent straight to the trash.
  CC it to the landlord as well.
  He has the right to use their services, but you have the right not to do business with them. Your agreement is with the landlord NOT a third party that came in after the fact.
- Report the emails as spam, especially if they're from the loan shark directly.
- All at once? It's either monthly with fees or a whole year of payments? This sounds illegal but what's legal these days. I would say fuck this guy and give him a check every month and if he refuses then put it in a escrow account and tell him if he will only take one lump payment then he can wait until the end of the year to collect it.
  By forcing lump payments they are removing your bargaining power when shit goes wrong. Withholding rent is the only power a renter has.
- Your landlord is a fool! They should have raised the rent by that same amount and then offered you a $10 a month discount to pay it all at once.
  Rookie doesn't know how to play a numbers/scam game. /s
  In truth, sorry you are only being given such a scummy "option". The simple math shows that the more often you pay (i e. the earlier the recipient gets your money) the more they make in the long run. They should just do that and be decent about the whole thing.

Why would anyone do this

Short answer: late stage capitalism
Long answer: Because they don't have enough money to make rent on time and the associated fees are less than the late fees. Being poor is expensive.
- I just moved from a shithole place that used and promoted Flex. The alternative was $300 late fees.
Same reason people finance their groceries over 4 weekly payments now.
- Rocket Mortgage has had this commercial for a couple years where some schlub is trudging back into his house lamenting the fact that six bags of groceries has become two (thanks to inflation). Suddenly his house starts talking to him and reminding him that he could get a Rocket Mortgage loan backed by his small amount of equity and use the money to buy groceries. Dude lights up with joy and dances into this house. It's just beyond fucked that this is obviously one of their most successful commercials. It's amazing that they can turn borrowing money for food into a positive.
I just got a postcard of this in the mail!
It wasn't from the landlord though and it didn't have any identifying information.
What a garbage company.

14.99 plus payment fee of 1% of rent amount. So if your rent is 2k that's another $20 per payment.

For what? Please tell me this is not the only payment option.

My apartment complex tried outsourcing their payment portal, attaching a fee to it, and making it the only way to pay.
I ended up going down to the office to write a check in front of them once a month, making sure to complain loud enough to be overheard when they had other people inquiring about apartments.
Apartments these days will nickle and dime you to death. Late in my tenancy, they wanted me to sign up to have my pets put into a database. They were also going to charge $25 per pet per month to have them in the database. You bet your ass I was in their office the next day with my pet addendum to discuss their breach of contract. My rabbits were not the dogs that kept getting loose and shitting all over the place.
- Had an apartment a while back, they changed owners and didn't really tell anyone until I got a note on my door saying next months rent, due in a week, can't be done online, needed to be cash check or money order or eviction process would start. What if I was out of the country or working remotely and didn't get the note? No email, no call, just note on the door.
  I threw a fucking fit, this was the last straw after a parking lot flooded with gravel, moldy laundry rooms, flooded apartment. Then threaten me with eviction because of their bullshit?
  I wrote up my refusal to renew then, like 2 months into a new lease. Made them reimburse me for having to get a money order (don't have checks), then began looking to buy. When renewal came up, they said I needed to renew and raised the prices. I referred them to my email and printout and told them to fuck themselves.
  They tried to bill me for cleaning after I moved out, just never replied.
- A check, that is petty revenge for sure. We had a portal when we were renting from a slumlord (though we were renting a ridiculously awesome house from them for a reasonable price, one they owned themselves, most of their portfolio was dumps owned by Chinese people who bought them unseen) and yeah it had a fee but $3/month was the fee. I still thought it was funny, paying online is cheaper for them than dealing with my paper check, but we have to cover the cost of online portal but not the check? I'd probably charge people for giving me a check and make online free, if anything.
  We did pay pet deposit, not pet rent. Fair I think, pets do add liability, even rabbits might get stressed and piss in the corner or something.

What does your lease say about payment and methods of payment?

I would suggest physically handing a nice big bag with a mix of nickels, dimes and quarters to a designated recipient.

Most leases these days specifically do not accept cash. However, I believe in most states, they are required by law to accept bank transfers without a fee.
Is the penny not legal tender anymore now that they aren't minting them?
- Pretty sure that is not how it works. There just wont be New ones
- It's still legal tender, they're just not making them anymore

Same shit as with pet screening. I already have to pay a $200 deposit for having a cat, a $30 per month fee for both cats and now $40 per cat per year for pet screening.

Lmao my landlord sent me a link to some pet screening thing I was meant to pay for.
But they forgot that that isn't actually in my lease so I just ignored it.

Which country is this? Do most landlords do this? /gen

When I lived in NYC, one of my apartments had a tipping option on the website
- Hollow tip are best, they spall inside the landlord and are less likely to exit out the back and damage anything of value.
- Wow. Either someone was too lazy to turn of the default settings, or figured it was appropriate to ask. Either way, that's some shocking lack-of-awareness going on.
- It's called Key Money but in some places like Japan it's essentially a gratuity (in the US and other places it's just a refundable security deposit)
- Peak Landlord Privilege
- I thought the "tip your landlord" meme was a joke...
I'm sure this is the US. And this is the first time I've heard of it in 35 years of renting.
- Insurers do this to doctors, too. They take a large "convenience fee" for electronic payment to the doctor. And they have no option to get physical checks. The relevant US regulatory agency briefly declared it illegal, but was convinced by lobbying their rule wouldn't hold up against a lawsuit, so they withdrew it. And Congress doesn't care to make the law more clear.

All landlords are leeches. Every single one of them.

Many are. But I'll stick my neck out here for when I rented in socal.
My landlord Randy was a retired dentist. He had built an ADU on his property in order to care for his very elderly mother. She had since passed away, leaving him with an empty mobile home in his backyard.
It sat empty for a few years, as his now-adult children and friends didn't need it. He couldn't sell it because of minimum plot size, setbacks, and utility issues.
I ended up renting from him for two years, and it was an excellent situation with reasonable rent and a great relationship.
I think a great many landlords are garbage, and I don't think it's possible to be a corporate landlord without being garbage. But there are some situations where a landlord is just a person who finds themselves in a situation where renting a space out makes the most sense. Open to other perspectives on this.
- Landlords, by virtue of being a landlord, means their income is generated through rent seeking off the basic human necessity of shelter via simply "owning" the domicile that is being lived in by someone else through the system of private property ownership which is a core feature inherent to the unjust and oppressive capitalist economy.
  By having their income be generated through simply having ownership over a means of survival makes them of the bourgeoisie/owning class and are inherently leeches off of those of the working class who must rent instead of own.
  Landlords should not exist. Period.

This could actually be interesting if it was the opposite...

You can get a small discount, and pre pay the next month in advance. You can miss any of those payments up until the end of the month when the remaining balance is due.

The discount is based off how much you paid early.

Landlord gets a reduced risk as every early payment is money that is in his hands and available up to a month before.

How is this different than putting 1/4 of your rent in a separate account each week?

You have to pay $14/month, plus processing fees on top of it.
Well, if you just got paid, the rent is due, and you're short, now you can pay a cell phone bill in fees forever to avoid being homeless
Being poor is expensive

Ours emails us this crap to. It's going to be in my review when I move out. Ever since the Texas megacorp bought this place it has gone downhill.

Yep me too. It's gross.

Burn it all down

Yeah my apartment landlord posted papers on the building doors about these guys. I looked into it myself, signed up but made no commitment to the system. I've read a few reviews from people who tried it, all were nightmares for them. I had actually thought this business was where you can pay some of the rent now and payback later, preferably on a payday.

However, the logic doesn't add up since landlords typically want everything by the first day of the month when its due. So, Flex didn't align with my thoughts which honestly would've alleviated some pressure financially, but they cram everything to be due by within the month. It is like, why the fuck bother?