Hi Everyone,

I need some help/advice. My fiance and I just purchased a home and per the sellers request, we need to do the closing this month. We are currenlty renting an apartment and our lease isn't up until February. We went to talk to them in the office about terminating the lease early and they said it would be a fee of $1700. Our rent is $825 which we will have to pay for September on top of this added fee.

I looked at our lease agreement and lease terms and it doesn't say anything about $1700 or how they would even derive at such a number.

Is this standard? That the apartment people don't list an early termination fee on any lease documents? I would have thought that with the fee being so high that it would have to be agreed upon before hand.

I am fully aware that we are indeed breaking a contract and we are more then willing to pay a fair fee, I just feel that this fee is a litte outrageous.

Not that I want to go down this road by any means, but what would happen if we just didn't pay it? We just put all of our savings into buying a home and we don't have much left to work with... Do you think if we try to compromise with them that we will get anywhere? Has anyone else gone through this at all?

Thanks so much for your time and help!

If you have a lease you could be held responsible for the entire balance of the lease. Have you browsed through the information in LawInfo's Free Legal Resource Center to learn more about your issue yet? See: http://www.lawinfo.com/consumer.html and http://resources.lawinfo.com/en/index.html. You can certainly try to speak to a lawyer to determine what legal options may be available. In the meantime, you may be able to learn more on your own. Search the "Free Legal Resources" tab, or browse the Consumer Resources. Good luck.