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"landlord raised my rent 40% and told me "that's just the market." i have eight weeks to decide whether to close."
"Café. Four years in that unit. Built the whole thing from an empty shell, my own money, my own hands, three months of eighteen-hour days before we opened. Lease is up. He wants 40% more. When I pushed back he shrugged and said that's just the market now, and he's not even wrong, because a chain would pay it. Here's what makes this rotten. My rent went up 40% because I made the street desirable. Four years of me being here, being good, drawing people in, is a large part of why this block is now worth more. I improved his asset with my life and now the improvement is being used to price me out of it. The math: at the new rent, I clear almost nothing. I would be working 60 hours a week to hand him the profit. The options as I see them: Sign it, work for free, and hope for a rent I can survive at the next renewal, which is naive. Move, which means rebuilding a fit-out I paid for once, losing every walk-in customer, and starting over on a street where I'm nobody. Or close, take the loss, and go work for someone else. I have eight weeks. For anyone who has faced a rent hike like this: did anyone successfully negotiate one down, and what actually moved the landlord? Has anyone moved and had the customers follow?"
"My husband lost all of our savings, the contents of his brokerage account, and took out a 50k 403(b) loan."
"My husband came to me tonight and told me that he lost all of our savings, the contents of his brokerage account that was set up by his grandfather, and that he took out a 50k 403b loan. I am currently just in shock. We had a baby in December and I love her more than anything. I went back to work full time in May after 5 months of maternity leave and have been working while taking care of her 2 days a week, we pay a nanny 2 days a week, and my mom comes the last day. I have been busting my ass trying to make this work. Staying up late working after the baby goes to bed to make up the time that I can’t work during the two days that I do with no help. I do UGC content on the weekends and I have donated eggs twice to grow our savings and pay for more than half of our expenses while he is in surgical residency. All of that money is gone. He has done this before. About a year ago, right after I got pregnant he stared trading options using the money in his brokerage account. He started with about 200k from his grandfather and grew that account to about 700k before losing about 550k of it in a bad trade, leaving us with 150k. He was keeping me in the loop about all of this. He came to me crying and spiraling when he lost the money. I was obviously disappointed when this happened but i didn’t get angry, and actually calmed him down. I had approved the trading since he was consistently making money and we had only lost 50k compared with the starting amount. All I asked is that he keeps me informed about future trades and that he doesn’t gambled with such a large proportion of our money again. He agreed. Fast forward to tonight, about 3 hours ago. He came to me crying again and told me that he has in fact been trading options again over the last year. He said that he wanted to make sure that we weren’t stressed about money and thought that he could handle it. He showed me the ups and downs of his brokerage account over the last year. He has lost and remade amounts up to 400k and now we have nothing. He got extra bold over the last month and has withdrawn, traded with, and then redeposited 70k from our savings account 3 separate times when his brokerage account went to zero. Then he lost that money. After he lost the 70k in our savings, he took out a 50k 403(b) loan, and lost that money. He only told me because we are completely out of money and he had nowhere else to turn. When he told me, I thanked him for telling me and reassured him that we can make it work and that I am not leaving him. Now he’s asleep and I’m seething rethinking the conversation. He asked me to ask my parents for money to repay his 403(b) loan. I also have another opportunity to donate eggs (this will make me 40k) which he encouraged me to take so that we can rebuild our savings. All of this feels so icky and idk how I can trust him and combine finances with him and help him. I really do believe that his intentions were to get our family in a financially secure position. He will also go from making 90k/year currently (I make 102k/year) to around 450k when he graduates residency in a year. Can someone give me advice? Should I be more mad? Less? Where do I go from here? Please help. I need my daughter to be safe and I still love my husband despite this betrayal."
"they just quit, saying the customer keeps running them in circles. Do I have any other options? Or do I just forget about it?"
"I don’t NEED this money, but it would be really nice to have, to expand the business quicker. And to recoup the $1500 ive already spent on winning in court."
"customer owes me $14k and has stopped replying, and everyone keeps saying "just take them to court" like that's a thing that happens"
"Small remodeling outfit. Me and three guys. Finished a kitchen in April. Good work. Walked the whole thing with them, they were happy, they signed off. Final invoice $14,200. Then nothing. Two months of nothing. Polite emails, then less polite emails, then calls, then a text that got read and not answered. Everyone says take them to court. And I keep nodding and going home and not doing it, and I want to be honest about why. It's a week of my life I don't have. It's lawyer money spent to chase money I'm already owed, which feels insane. And there's a version where I win and they still don't pay, and I've spent $3k to get a piece of paper that says I'm right. Meanwhile the $14k is the difference between me being fine this quarter and not being fine. What I actually want to know from people who've been here: Did small claims work, or did you win and still not get paid? Is a mechanics lien worth it at this size, and does it make them pay or just make them dig in? And is there a move before the legal stuff that actually works, or is the polite-email phase just theater? Never been stiffed this badly and I don't want to handle it stupidly."
"Served lawsuit for website not being accessible for blind people. What recourse do we have?"
"Obviously this is not something we intended and don’t want to exclude anyone, much less blind people. Same thing happened to my buddies small business a couple months ago and thought it was a random one off thing. This morning my wife arrives at our physical retail location and had the suit taped to her door. I did some quick research and it seems suits for lack of website accessibility is up 49% year over year for the past two years and the bulk of these are known as “sue and settle” cases. I circled back to my buddy and he is trying to settle for $15k plus will have to pay for ongoing management of his website so it’s accessible. We use Shopify and it seems they should have the tools in place to account for this. How is this even fair?? We don’t have the funds to cover a cost like that to settle although we would gladly do everything possible to make our site accessible. We reached out to our attorney and they stated this is serious as it’s a federal case out of western NC. Zero clue how we even got on this federal suit. I’m planning on writing our state AG, congressman, etc. half of me wants to reach out to the law office that brought the suit and explain the situation (ironic enough their website talks about business litigation and wanting to help small businesses), but I’m sure this would not help in the slightest and potentially hurt our case. We’re so distressed and torn up over this. Has anyone else experienced this? If so, was there anything you could do to not pay a 5 figure settlement? Edit to add this new article I quickly found so people are aware what’s going on:"
"the dentist quoted almost an entire month of rent"
"My son started complaining about one of his back teeth three days ago. At first, he said it only hurt when he chewed, so I thought maybe he had food stuck somewhere or had irritated his gum. Yesterday morning, he woke up crying, and one side of his face looked slightly swollen. I called every dentist near us that said they were accepting new patients. Most either had no openings for weeks or wanted payment upfront. I finally found an office that could see him that same afternoon. They charged $140 for the exam and X-rays, then told me he has a badly infected tooth. The dentist said it needs either a root canal and crown or an extraction. The estimate was around $2,300 for the root canal option and just under $700 to remove the tooth, not including any additional treatment if the infection gets worse. I work full-time and make slightly too much to qualify for our state dental program, but nowhere near enough to have $700 sitting around for an emergency. My employer’s dental insurance barely covers anything, and it wouldn’t start until open enrollment in January anyway. Our rent is $1,050, I have $180 in savings, and my next paycheck already has groceries, utilities, and car insurance attached to it. The dentist prescribed antibiotics and said they should calm the infection temporarily, but made it very clear that they won’t fix the tooth. The office offered financing, but I was denied because my credit took a hit after I missed payments during a layoff last year. I asked whether I could pay the office directly in installments, but they said the full amount has to be paid before treatment. So far, I’ve called a dental school about an hour away, a community clinic, and two offices that advertise sliding-scale care. The dental school said they would call me back, and the community clinic’s next available appointment is in three weeks. I’m going to keep calling first thing tomorrow in case somebody has a cancellation, but right now I feel completely stuck. He’s taking the antibiotics and children’s pain medicine exactly as directed. I’ll take him to the ER immediately if the swelling gets worse, he develops a fever, or anything else changes, but I know the ER probably won’t actually repair the tooth. Has anyone dealt with emergency dental care for a child when you’re technically above the assistance cutoff but still completely broke? I’m not trying to avoid paying. I genuinely cannot come up with $700 this week. I feel horrible that my kid is hurting while I’m sitting here trying to solve an infected tooth with phone calls and a calculator."
"this dries mine out every single time"
"Doesn't matter if I go low and slow, or high and fast, whether I marinate or not. If I follow the instructions in a published recipe my breasts go dry as a freaking board. I read elsewhere that's it's perfectly safe to just go to 150 because it actually kills all the bacteria by being at that temp for a while, but you never see this in recipes. And yes, I get you can brine them or whatnot, but that's not what these recipes are doing. WHO IS WRONG DANGIT edit: lol I posted this mostly out of rage and woke up to the old "99+ messages" thing. edit2: damn some of you all don't actually read the post body, do you"