Other Posts by Hapless Investor

• Be careful what you wish for 'cos you just might get it
• You can't always get what you want,
• Just when you though it was safe to go back in the water...
• Drying out
• It never rains but it pours
• The hand that rocks the cradle
• When the going gets tough...
• Would you Adam & Eve it?
• Reality Bites
• Buy two get one fee!
• The withdrawal method
• Home coming
• A tale of two cities
• Manchester and The CPO
• The rise of the text sick note, and the email rent avoidance excuse.
• The best laid plans of Mice and Men - and slugs named Nigel
• The cost of property developing
• Mancunian madness
• The story so far

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Career advice for the uninitiated.

By Hapless Investor

Not that you'd know it now but when I was younger I used to regularly compete as a teenage beauty queen. Although not quite in the league of the American pageants our local carnival circuit used to invite pre-teen and teenage girls to strut their stuff on the catwalk dressed to the nines in their party dresses and primped hair in order to win a place on the carnival float and a prize between £40 and £250 - don't knock it, it's how my sister bought her first car. The judges were looking for deportment, the ability to smile but also the capacity to string a couple of sentences together.

You were invariably asked about your favourite actor, film or pop star, your favourite place to holiday and what you wanted to be when you grew up. And I always knew the answer. I was going to be a lawyer. From the time I was 6, with the exception of that brief interlude where I was going to be the first female astronaut to set foot on Mars, I was going to be a lawyer. No make that a Barrister, no a High Court Judge.

There was no doubt about it, the legal profession was where I was headed, pretty much right up until the pageants stopped and I realised that law wasn't really for me. Oh if only I knew then what I know now. Why teenage me, Why!

Having had our reprimand from the council Harridan and let the evil Adam back into the flat the struggle started to get the expletive out. We spoke with the lawyer who told us to do whatever it took to avoid the threat of jail but as he was only a criminal lawyer he (hopefully) couldn't be of any further help. 

So the search started for a civil lawyer. Or more realistically a lawyer who specialised in civil law.

In my area there are 65 listings for lawyers who deal in tenancy law in our local Yellow Pages but it seemed to be that although the lawyers we phoned did deal in this they only dealt with it from the tenant's side. As a landlord, even one as clearly (!) wronged as we were, we were indefensible.

We eventually found a firm in the next city whose partner could deal with our case from our point of view. We took an afternoon off, took all our paperwork and went to see Mr Jones. Mr Jones was very sympathetic and, even better, empathetic. He said that we could get Adam out and we could go after him, Eve, and Adam's mother who had acted as guarantor for Adam.  He said we could make sure that they paid: not only for the back rent, but the state of the flat as well.

Finally someone was on our side. Someone understood that Adam was wrong and we, yes us, were right. Finally! "Although Miss Hapless Investor," the lawyer intoned, "before we get to your unrequited support and happy ever after ending, let me first present you with our hourly rate and an approximation of your final bill. To successfully legally remove your tenant, track him and his errant wife, and mother down and get you back your money, now approximately £6000, and do all this with only a semi-smug look on my face will cost you in the region of £6500. That's £170 per hour."

Ahh.

Damn it. There had to be a plan B.

What if I could find a Delorian and somehow power it with 1.21 gigawatts... No that'd never work. I'd be far better looking for an old fashioned police box. We couldn't even shop around and find an alternative lawyer simply because there weren't any. It was this guy or nothing , and nothing had almost landed us in jail.

We instructed the lawyer to go ahead with the basics: concentrate on getting Adam out and at least then we wouldn't be losing any more money. The lawyer would also write to the guarantor and tell her that she had been named in a law suit and we would be pursuing her directly for lost rent.

At last something was happening. We might not be going out like a combination of Rambo and the Terminator in a blaze of retribution, revenge and righteousness but we were actually making progress, we were going to get that scumbag gone, and even better we were going to tell on him to his mum. That'll teach him.

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