Financial Support And Renting A Property
What financial support is available to me?
There is some financial support if you're a tenet renting in the private market, but you need to fit certain circumstances. For example, if you're on job seeker's allowance, incapacity benefit, you're on retirement pension, or indeed, what's classed as just a low income, it may well be that they will top up some of your rent to make sure that you've got a roof over your hear, as long as you are over 16. If, however, you've come to this country and you are not a resident, you will not be able to get any support. You can get help, for example, if you can afford the rent, but you can't afford the deposit, in certain cases, some local authorities, will do what they call pay a bond, and that is effectively pay a deposit on your behalf. In other cases, if it's quite serious and you can't pay your rent for a short period of time, they may even try and cover that rent for you. You'd have to pay them back at some stage, but just to get you over a difficult period, they would do that for you to avoid you being homeless.
I am in full time education. Can I pay half rent over vacations?
Whether you can pay half rent over vacations or not when in full time education depends on the tenancy agreements and, particularly, what the landlord of the rented property allows you to do. In some cases, you'll be able to, but in the private rental sector it's unlikely. However, what you might be able to do to help is, if you're going home during that the vacation period, you might be able to agree with the landlord that somebody can come in and you can sublet your rented room for that period of time to help you cover some of the costs on the property.
How do I get a bargain property?
I'm afraid in this life you tend to get what you pay for. However, if you are after a bargain property to rent, the best way to try and find those is to look for the ones that have been on the market for more than a month or so, because the landlord is probably really starting to miss their rent at that point. As a result, it may well be - for example, if it's up to £500 - that you could offer £400 and they would be more readily available to accept that offer on the property. The other way you could look at trying to find a rental property at a bargain price is to find one that actually needs a bit of doing up (redecoration, for example), and if you agree to pay a lower amount because of its decoration state, you might then agree to be able to do it up. You get a property at a discounted rate, but if you do it up yourself, you actually get quite a nice rental property to live in.
