Teen says her roommates kept changing the rent, pushed for her parents’ contact information, and made moving out feel like another fight
In a Reddit post, one 18-year-old college student in Arizona said she was trying to leave a roommate situation that had felt wrong for a long time. She wrote that she was not on a formal lease with the landlord and that there was no written agreement covering rent changes in a stable way. Instead, according to the post, a new roommate had been added later, the rent amount kept shifting, and there was even an incident where she was temporarily denied access to her own room. She said that was part of what pushed her to give 30 days’ notice and say she would pay through February before leaving.
What made the story feel more unsettling was what happened after she tried to leave cleanly. She said one roommate started asking for her parents’ contact information and kept pushing to involve them, even though she was already 18 and did not want anyone else dragged into it. In the post, she said she had tried to keep communication limited to written move-out logistics only, but the pressure kept building. After she refused to share her parents’ details, she said one of the roommates contacted a friend of hers instead.
The more she explained in the thread, the clearer it became that the living arrangement had been messy from the beginning. She said the only thing she had ever signed was an informal iPad document between roommates about how rent would be split, not an actual lease with the landlord or complex. She also said she signed that when she was 17, and that after it was signed, the rent arrangement changed again when another roommate moved in. In later comments, she said the apartment was far from school, she did not have a car while the others did, and she felt pressured into the setup after being guilt-tripped into agreeing to it.
By the time she was updating the post, the tone had shifted from frustration to fear. She wrote that the roommates had harassed her for almost a year and that now, after she had finally found the nerve to leave, they were pressuring her even harder. She told commenters she still had belongings in the apartment and was scared to go back and collect them because she did not know how they would act once she showed up. In one comment, she said plainly, “I’m so scared rn,” which made the whole situation feel less like ordinary roommate drama and more like someone trying to get out without things getting worse first.
Abbie Clark is the founder and editor of Now Rundown, covering the stories that hit households first—health, politics, insurance, home costs, scams, and the fine print people often learn too late.
