This is the Rental Income Podcast, where we talk to owners of rental properties and give you actionable tips and advice that will help you make more money while dealing with less hassle.

And now your host, Dan Lane.

Probably the worst thing that can happen to you as a landlord is you can have the combination one-two punch of a tenant not paying and at the same time

trashing your house.

And that is exactly what happened to Nikki Kenyon.

Nikki, welcome to the show.

Before we get into your story, why don't you tell us how did you become a landlord?

Well, let's see.

So we purchased the house in 2004.

I was living there with my family, my now

ex-husband, and three kids. And after the divorce, we decided to, you know, kind of split custody.

So tried to sell the house. This was in 2011, and it was underwater. There was just no way. The economy was

horrible. I would have wound up losing a lot of money. So I felt like my only option was really

to just rent it out and wait until the market recovered. So that's what I did. I've had three sets of tenants total since 2011, and two-thirds have been an absolute nightmare.

I'm so sorry to hear that.

So let's kind of walk through everything.

So the very first tenants that you had, what happened with

them? Like, where did, where did that go bad? Well, so my realtor found this tenant. He said he

was a former Marine. He worked for a security company. So he had a clearance. He was a government

contractor. Everything seemed to be

everything seemed to be in order. So he, he chose to pay via ACH or automatic transfer into my bank account.

So he paid rent every month. So after about five months, this was in like September of 2011,

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