http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/forum/ask-a-mustachian/ethics-vs-money-and-security-for-a-rental/msg36874/#msg36874

If both parties have signed the contract, you are probably stuck with this tenant.  If you have not signed yet, you could just not move forward with the deal.  In your shoes, I would notify her immediately if you decide to do that.In the future, you may want to advertise locally for tenants.  Accepting a tenant from outside the country may leave you with several months of unpaid rent and a lot of damage to clean up.  Meanwhile, that tenant will have moved out of the country, leaving you with no recourse.  A guarantee from her employer only helps if you have a contract with the employer.

The local company probably provides short term furnished housing for new employees and/or contractors.  I would not do that either.  You mention apartment – is this a coop or condo?  The homeowners association probably prohibits short term rentals anyway.

If you used Craigslist to find a tenant, I would not do that in the future.  I only got flakes and con artists from Craigslist.  If you are not comfortable with or knowlegeable about being a landlord in your area, you might want to consider hiring a property manager.   Yes, it will cost you some money, but it will relieve you of some of the headaches of being a landlord.

Consolidate investments or use multiple institutions?

I currently have our mortgage, visa, checking, a savings, credit line, my RRSP, my wifes RRSP, my TFSA, my wifes TFSA and our kids RESP all with one bank.   beyond that we also have 1 savings account with ING.

At first this seemed like a good thing because banking fees and so on where waved due to having the mortgage with them. They make about $140/week in interest off of me so it was easy enough for them to wave the $11/month charge for having a checking account.      That apparently no longer matters to them and they’ve started charging me the fee unless I keep $5000 in the checking account earning something like 0.1% interest.

So besides calling the bank to rip their heads off over the fee I’m wondering if consolidating everything to one institution like this has any advantages besides ease of logging into 1 webpage to do things?   I still get 4 letters from them every quarter (mortgage, rrsp’s/tfsa’sX2 and RESP).    As well my current investments are mostly GIC’s and cash.  The options they provide seem to be pretty high fee and don’t really cover what I’m thinking of putting some money into(low cost index funds)  So I’m likely to be setting up RRSP accounts with another institution soon.

I’m also wondering if it makes sense to move most investments out of the banks and into firms that specialize in investments not everything that has to do with money.

I get the feeling this is probably a preference thing but may be missing something.