5 Ways To Minimise Your Rent Expense and associated costs.

Live with relatives

Yes, I fully realize that living with relatives won’t work for some families. However, if your folks or other relatives have the space and temperament to let you live under their roof, it can be a terrific way to keep your rental costs to a minimum. Just be sure to have some lengthy discussions first to set expectations and ground rules, raise concerns, and establish terms, including costs and rental agreements.

Share a rental with roommates

Living solo is a pricey luxury most younger people can’t afford. Doing so definitely has its benefits — you have more privacy and control over your home environment. Renting may sacrifice some of these advantages to living alone, but having roomies also has its pros. If you share a rental with roommates, the per-person costs should be substantially less than if you live solo. You must be in a sharing mood, though, to live harmoniously with roommates. They may help themselves to your food or shampoo, stay up late when you need to get up early the next day, or invite over inconsiderate friends. Roommates aren’t all bad, though, as they can brighten your social life.

Warning:Before you choose to share a dwelling with someone, make sure that you can live with the person for the length of the rental agreement. If you break the lease, you may owe a hefty amount of money, which defeats the purpose of saving money with a roommate.

Tips:Be sure to have a rental agreement in place with your landlord and to have all renters listed in the agreement. Don’t allow others who aren’t listed in the agreement to live in the rental, because you and the other renters could be on the hook for damage they cause and rent they don’t pay.

Move to a lower-cost rental

You may realize that you’re currently living beyond your means and you need to make some adjustments. You may have allowed your champagne tastes to exceed your beer budget when you went shopping for a home rental. So long as you’re completing your current lease, there’s no reason you can’t move to a lower-cost rental. The less you spend renting, the more you can save toward buying your own place. Just be sure to factor in all the costs of moving to and living in a new rental.

Of course, a lower-cost rental may be lower quality and not up to your standards. Don’t accept living in a high-crime neighborhood, a poorly maintained building, or a location that causes you to burn much of your free time commuting to work.

Negotiate your rental increases

Every year, some landlords increase their tenants’ rent no matter how good the tenant has been and regardless of the state of the economy. If your local economy is soft (check out the unemployment rate) and the rental market is soft or your living quarters are deteriorating, negotiate with your landlord. You have more leverage and power than you probably realize. A smart landlord doesn’t want to lose good tenants who pay rent on time. Filling vacancies takes time and money.

Tips: State your case through a well-crafted and polite note or personal visit. Explain how you have been a responsible tenant, always paid your rent on time, and cared for your unit, and convey that your research shows comparable rentals going for less. Briefly explaining any challenging financial circumstances (such as reduced pay from your job) may help your case as well. If you can’t stave off the rent increase, perhaps you can negotiate some improvements you value.

Get on the path to purchasing your own home

Purchasing a home always seems costly. However, over the long term, owning is usually less costly than renting a similar property. And as a homeowner, you build equity (the difference between the home’s value and what you owe on it) in your property as you make mortgage payments and the home’s value increases over the long term. If you purchase a property with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, the biggest expense of ownership — your monthly mortgage payment — is locked in and remains level. By contrast, as a renter, unless you live in a rent-controlled unit, your entire monthly housing cost is exposed to inflation.