So my partner's aunt owns our home. It's a 1 bedroom bungalow in an estate designed for elderly and disabled people. Its valued currently at around £70k and she more than likely paid a mortgage of less than £150 per month when she bought it 15 years ago, we currently pay £550 per month despite her first offering the property to my partners uncle for £200 per month. The property was fairly dilapidated when we moved in just before COVID and we put a lot of money and energy into making it liveable with the intent of buying the property when we were in a financial position to do so.
As a side note, landlady is retired and living in another bought property.
Around 3 months after we moved in my partner decided to go back to school for a career change, this was well thought out and budgeted as she would be reducing her working hours to accommodate studying.
Queue COVID and our immediate loss of jobs. The government paid us 80% of our income for 3 months to assist in finding new jobs, the issue here is that for the 6 months prior to the pandemic my partner was only earning around £150 as she was part time for studying. This set us back drastically, but as the government was also providing a 4 month rent/mortgage break due to the circumstances we figured we would be fine. We were both back in work within 3 months but not earning what we used to as labour costs had been cut to ensure adequate social distancing between staff etc. We communicated all of these conditions to our landlady in the interest of total transparency. I even went out of my way to create a budget spreadsheet to show her all our outgoings and how much we could realistically put towards rent every month. She remained silent on the matter for over a year. We kept up with payments but never really got out of the deficit we found ourselves in during lockdown. After a while our landlady starts sending messages asking how we're getting on with rent (she never comes across aggressive, just incessant) and will not forgo to 4 months rent the government advised as she is no longer paying a mortgage and did not benefit from this measure. I've received another message tonight and I'm struggling to talk myself out of the anger I'm feeling right now.
Apologies for editing, I'm too angry to try. Also apologies if I actually am the asshole here, I came to reddit because I didn't want to trash talk my partner's family to her face