Maybe in the old days not paying your last month's rent would be an option but not today.

Nobody who is truly poor would skip out on the last month rent unless they were desperate, because the landlord will find things wrong with the apartment and will charge you the most or all of the security deposit. Then they will file an unpaid dept claim, turn it over to a debt collection agency and it will hit your credit score. Which means in the future you have to rent in the really scary parts of the city, and if you don't want to rent in the really scary part of the city you'll pay your last month's rent. Also a lot of jobs check credit scores, a bad report could keep the author from getting hired.

In regard to the car, the author doesn't have the credit score or income level to even qualify for the lease let alone, "the cheapest lease deals", not to mention the author certainly doesn't have the $3K down payment. If you are thinking that they can just roll the down payment into the lease, well they only let you do that if you have the best credit score.

upstanding citizen who briefly rented from a slumlord (NYC) here. When it became obvious my landlord wasn't gonna give me my deposit back I just didn't pay the last month's rent. never heard another word about it. I left the place spotless, as I would've regardless of anything related to the deposit.

You can't even get a lease with bad credit. And with poor credit you're not getting these "$200/month" offers for leases. Those assume pretty good credit scores, which you almost certainly won't have if you're poor enough you have to let utilities get shut off.

That came to my mind as well. If I don't expect the deposit back and cannot afford to claim it, let's just turn the tables and make them claim something from me.

Here in the UK that would destroy any chances of renting anything decent in the future. Any agency/landlord will always ask for references from your current landlord, if you dick them over like this you can forget ever renting something that isn't a slum where people don't care about references.

Also deposits are always(by law) held by a third party in escrow, and it's actually a bit of a pain to claim any money from that as a landlord, so it's really rare that people lose their deposits unless the place is absolutely wrecked.

In the US you can sue for anything. Smart landlords only confirm that someone lived there, and other easily verifiable information, since if they sometimes give a good reference and sometimes neutral that means neutral references are bad and they can be sued for that. If you get a anything more as reference from a landlord it is because you were bad enough that the landlord sued and won (it is safe to assume this never happens, though there are exceptions)

Don't confuse suing with winning. You can sue someone and lose, but the lawyers will still cost both sides a lot of money.

In reality (in the UK), those references precede your current landlord getting to check your apartment's condition out. By the time the landlord has ascertained the state of the property, the reference has usually been given.

>Any agency/landlord will always ask for references from your current landlord

Give them your buddies contact information.

He chose a car manufacturer that no longer makes compact sedans for his example, which is flat-out deceptive.

Someone who can write that well can probably find ways to make more money if he needs it - what else is he trying to deceive us about?