The word doing all the work in her rent to own contract is "timely"
A friend's daughter is renting a house with an option to buy it and she asked me to look at the paperwork, mostly because I'm the person in her life who reads things. Eleven pages, one staple, lease and option jammed into the same document.
Rent is 1,900. The paperwork says 300 a month goes toward the purchase and the price is fixed at 289,000 for three years. She'd been in there fourteen months and had 4,200 in her head as money already banked.
Page nine says the credit accrues only on rent received timely, and defines timely as on or before the first. Not a grace period, the first. She'd paid on the fourth twice, once because the bank held a deposit. So by the plain words on the page she had 3,600, and the landlord's position was that it was zero because another clause said any default voids all accrued credits.
What got me was she'd never read page nine. She read the number 300 in the email and the price and stopped. The landlord isn't a villain either, I think he downloaded the form and never priced what he was giving away.
They're talking now. She's asking for a separate option agreement and a written statement of the credit balance every January. She got that idea from her mother's insurance guy, not from anyone in real estate, which tells you something.