How is rent paid? How is rent collected?

 

There are several common ways for landlords to collect and for you to pay rent.  This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it sums up all the ways I’ve paid and collected. 

• Administration.  You hire/you pay an administrator to collect rent for you.  Most real estate agencies provide this service.  If you own a lot of rental properties, you may go this route.  
• Owner collects/pays to.  An owner can drop by every month and collect the rent or have it mailed to them.  If picked up, it’s almost always cash.  If mailed, it is by cheque. 
• Payment in advance.   I’ve seen this done about 30% of the time.  You pay/collect for the whole year or half the year up front.  Usually in cash, but sometimes by cheque. 
• Autodebit.  This is quite common if the owner has a bank account.  It is one of the most common ways people pay and collect rents in Montevideo.  See the forms attached for an idea how this works. 

forms-abac-persona-fisica.pdf

• Abitab/RedPago.  These are the little shops that many Uruguayans pay their bills at.  Before autodebit (see above), these were much busier.  There have been many posts on this kind of business.   That’s probably because we see nothing like it up north.  In the North, the banks took this business on at the beginning, leaving no room for another industry to popup.  Here, banks for some reason didn’t want to do this, so up popped these bill paying shops.  These are often used by the administation agencies, like the reference above.  The administration company sets up an acocunt with RedPago or Abitab (the biggest) and when you get your monthly invoice, (you need an invoice to pay a bill in an Abitab/RedPago), it states which agencies you can use. 

We have 4 rental properties.  One in the boonies, uses an administrator.  The other 3 all use autodebit.  With autodebit, I find it easier to manage things.  If you’re a northerner who is looking to invest your retirement savings in rental properties (instead of stocks or bonds, etc), autodebit is a very simple and painless way to collect the rent. 

Do you suffer from allergies?

 

There was a post on the Southron forum about air quality in Montevideo.  Consensus amongst us ex-pats is that it’s so little, it’s nothing to bother a northerner about. 

Pollution aside, there is something you should keep in mind if you plan to live here.  Allergens.  If you’re allergic to anything, until you’ve lived here a few years, you wont know if there’s something new here that will set you off.   It’s likely to happen in the first 12 months you’re here, but sometimes things like molds and spores and even pollens, are suppressed for some environmental reason for a year or two.  I wasn’t so lucky. 

As a kid, I had hay fever, took the scratch tests, found out I was allergic to everything, but only ragweed was bad enough to do something about.  For many years I lived on Chlortripolon in September, then switched to the new drugs, like Claritin.  By the 2000’s, it hardly bothered me.   But last November, it (or something else), hit me like a truck. 

A few days before my birthday in late November, I awoke one morning to a stuffy nose, itchy eyes and scratchy throat.  Over the next 2 days I tried everything I knew, but it just kept getting worse.  It got so bad, I couldn’t sleep.  I was going to book a trip north and hide out for a few weeks until whatever was in the air here, went away.  Fortunately, my wife’s friend knew an allergy specialist and got me in to see her that  evening.  She prescribed me Prednasone, a steroid nose spray and a strong eye drop.  Well, was I surprised.  It was totally gone in a few hours.  After taking the meds for a couple of weeks, I stopped and it never came back.

Moral of the story.  If you are allergic to anything, you may find new allergies here.  Whatever I had was not something the body had ever experienced before and it reacted violently.  If that happens to you here, get in to see an allergy specialist.  If you pay them privately, you can get in same or next day.  I think it was the Prednasone that stopped it cold.  It’s a very, very powerful drug.  I’ve used it before.  Most transplant patients are on it.  It should just about stop any kind of allergic reaction you run into here.

This November, when I see her again, I’m going to ask for a set of scratch tests so I know what it is.  I think it’s a tree.  She thought it was a grass.