Landlord wants three months of payslips and I have never had one in my life

found a flat i actually want. agent wants three months of payslips and an employer reference

i have neither and never will. i earn more than the salary they'd want to see, which somehow makes it worse because i can't even pretend to be a junior something

what do people do here? offer six months up front? get a mate to write something? i genuinely don't know what the normal move is and i'm going to lose the flat while i work it out

six months up front. they'll stop asking questions before you finish the sentence

There is a normal move and it is not a favour from a friend.

What a self-employed person presents in this situation is: an accountant's letter confirming income, the last set of accounts or a tax return, and three to six months of bank statements showing money arriving. Agents deal with this constantly — contractors, freelancers, sole traders. It is a form they already have.

Which means the actual obstacle for most people here isn't the landlord. It's that they have none of those three documents, because they have never filed anything and their income arrives from four companies in three countries into an account that also buys their groceries.

If you have a return, this is a twenty-minute problem. If you don't, the flat is the second thing you've lost to it and you won't notice the first.

The invisible cost of the invisible income.

an accountant's letter. the most black hat document in this thread

In Kyiv nobody ask me anything, i pay cash and that is the contract. Anyway i understand this is not helpful for you.

I went through this in Warsaw two years ago and the thing that actually worked was boring: I offered a larger deposit rather than more months up front, and I brought a printed one-page summary of income by month with the bank statements attached.

The summary is what did it. Not because it proves anything — I wrote it myself — but because it let the agent tick a box and move on instead of having to think about me.

Most of these gates are staffed by someone who wants a file that looks like the other files.

offered them nine months up front and they said no?? apparently that looks worse

Lost a flat exactly like this in 2017 and got the next one by having a company with two years of accounts behind me - which I only had because of a completely unrelated argument with a client.

Funny how the boring admin turns out to be the thing that buys you a front door. Did you offer them anything yet or are you still deciding?