Help Laura's Family in their Housing Struggle

Hi, my name is Laura, and I currently live in Glendora, California with my husband, our two sons, and our two fur-babies. We started renting a lovely 4-bedroom house on a quiet cul-de-sac 19 years ago.

We have celebrated holidays and birthdays, seen our boys grow up and become the wonderful men they are. We have had several ups and downs personally, financially, and emotionally. We have lost jobs, found careers, lost loved ones, mourned, and rejoiced.

After the past two very difficult, stressful, hard-fought years, we have come to the decision that we need to move. Unfortunately, we have used all our savings for our current housing situation and I am asking for help for moving expenses. For legal reasons, I can’t go into details.

Finding a rental in our price range is NOT going to be easy, but even if we find a place, we have to pay per rental application, per adult, for every place, then there’s first month rent, and security deposit, and all the moving expenses. When you live in a house, and make it a home, for almost 20 years, we will need a LOT of boxes!

The legal limit for rental application fees is about $65; for 4 adults, that’s $260 every time. If we apply for 10 rental places, that’s $2600. And I’m assuming we will have to keep applying to places because we don’t have great credit and landlords can afford to be pickier than ever before. We were barely approved for the house we currently rent. And we have to find a place that accepts cats, which is also not easy.

Had I known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have used all my retirement savings in paying back rent based on our issues we had during COVID.

We can rent a truck and move our own stuff, but even with all the boxes and a rental truck for a few days, that’s about $1000. I would like to take our time moving by getting a POD (or something like that), load it when we can, then have the company move the storage PODs to our new place. That doesn’t include storage fees if we have to settle for a place that doesn’t have a garage, which we currently have, and it’s full. If we need to go smaller, then we’ll probably have furniture, books, tools, and other things that just won’t fit in a smaller house.

I’m asking for a total of $10,000 to help with rental application fees and all moving expenses. Our maximum monthly rent is $2500, security deposit will be around $2500 - $3500, and hopefully we will only have to apply to a few rentals before getting accepted, plus $2000 for a moving van for a couple days (and lots of boxes, tape, bubble wrap, and furniture dolly) or a POD and all the packing/moving supplies. Then there’s the rental application fees, I think $10,000 is a good safe amount for our moving and first month rental expenses.

I don’t have a timeline in mind as it will honestly depend on how often we can apply for rental places, find a place we can afford, get approved, and then packing a house we’ve been in for almost 20 years. I don’t relish the idea of packing and moving during summer, but maybe that’s a good time to find a place because in southern California that will be a really good test of how well the air conditioning works!

Please help my family with however much or however little you see fit or can manage. We would be grateful!

If you would like a little more about the last few years, this house has enough issues, and after losing my mom in 2020, I wouldn’t mind moving and not being reminded of her in every room. I will always remember my mom, but being able to live in a house where I didn’t see her last conscious moment before calling 911 would be peace of mind.

I can’t imagine leaving the house my boys grew up in. At the same time, leaving the house where some of my mom’s last moment’s were in is also reason to leave. I haven’t even planned or held a memorial service for my mom; something that bugs me all the time. Although I’m not going to ask for funds for that. It wouldn’t take much, but with COVID, stressful horrible jobs, unemployment, then fighting for our house, it just never seems to work out.

If there are enough donations, then I will use them to finally plan my mom’s memorial service. If you have made it far enough to read this much and you knew my mom, and you were wondering about it, now you know. I think a big part of not planning something was connected to my job problems, and fighting for the house. I feel like I would have to have a service somewhere else. I wouldn’t feel good having a service or wake at my house given the condition it’s in.

Thank you for reading my story. If you donate, thank you for supporting my family; I truly appreciate it!