conversation: User (HighnessOfCats): "Hi everyone, one of my friends pointed me towards coming here for advice on what to do. \nI’m 21 and I bought a condo last year from ‘help’ from my grandmother. It’s a rant all on its own about the way I came to acquire this house, but I’m going to leave it as she helped with the down payment and was the guarantor on my loan. I bought it for 136,000.00 with a down payment of 40,000. After a year I owe about 88,000 on the house. Because I’m a student with low income and my grandmother lives out of country, no bank would accept us, therefore we had to use a private lender. Using this lender, I have to renew my mortgage yearly with them, and they changed the price of my monthly payments as well as the interest this year. It was jumped to 577.00 per month and the interest is now at 8.2% from 6.2ish (I can’t remember exactly what it was). \nThe house is three bedrooms. I live in one of the bedrooms, I have a roommate that pays 550.00 dollars a month and my mother that lives with me. Issue is, I’m broke. If the word “student” didn’t scream it enough, I get my student loans in and they’re gone before I know what to do with them, I’m crawling in credit card debt (-3000ish from different mishaps and issues) thanks to my student loans being gone, and my bank account is in overdraft (-500ish) thanks to my mortgage payments coming out. Here is a general layout of how much my house cost monthly:\n\n\nMortgage payment 560\n\nGas 70\n\nhydro70\n\ninternet/tv (in a contract for one more year) 171\n\nStrata 300\n\n\nIt comes to about 1200 a month (you can do the exact math if you want). This doesn’t include my credit card bill (80) or my cell phone bill (70) and car insurance (180). \n\nThe issue I have is between my mother and I. If I was to not have my mother as my roommate it wouldn’t be as bad, I’d have two people paying me 550 a month basically paying for everything. The deal I have with her is that she pays for half of the bills and I do the other.  But this month has hit me hard because there was so much I needed to do which included getting insurance for another year for the house (400.00). I have another whole month before I get my student loan (which is 4300) in for my next “school” year which is going to turn into just trying to catch up again (this happened in summer too). \nAt this point, I’m searching for a part time job to just to even try to get some money in. Which isn’t going so well. \n\n\nDo you have any advice on once I get money on how not to get into this situation again? Or just how to handle my finances better because obviously I’m doing it wrong. \n"
  Self: "Start charging your mom rent"
  