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If you like animals but aren’t ready for the responsibility of owning your own pet yet, having a pet owner for a roommate can seem like a great deal. You benefit from many of the perks of having a pet with a fraction of the responsibility. Of course, things don’t always go smoothly. Your stuff is just as vulnerable as your roommate’s is to cat scratches and stains from dog urine. If your roommate’s hamster escapes its cage, it becomes your problem as well. When you agree to live with someone who has a pet, it’s best to figure out where to draw the line of responsibility before things go wrong.

You’ve got loads of junk—old baseball card collections, a never-used tennis racquet, clothes you always thought you’d be able to fit into again but never quite did— piled up in your apartment, and you’re sure your neighbors do, too. You’d like to organize an apartment-wide garage sale, but you don’t know where to start. Never fear, the collectivewisdom of people who’ve done it before is assembled here to help you out!

Take a quick survey of your friends and chances are, many of them can share horror stories about moving companies that damaged their property during a move. This isn’t surprising because lots of things can go wrong. Delicate items can be bumped and broken, boxes can be lost and both your new and old apartments can be damaged during the moving process. Many people assume that a moving company has insurance to cover loss and damage. The truth is a little more complicated. Because companies that offer insurance are regulated by the state, most moving companies do not actually offer insurance. Many moving companies do offer some protection to clients in the form of mover’s valuation.

We’ve all heard the adage—reduce, reuse, recycle. But how can you recycle if your apartment doesn’t offer a program, and you don’t know your local recycling resources? Never fear—environmentalists are in every city or town, and want nothing more than to help you learn about recycling—or even start a recycling program of your own if necessary. Whether it’s plastic, aluminum, glass, or paper, there will be people and places that can help recycle almost anything.

David, a Mexican-American, was looking for an affordable one-bedroom apartment in the Washington, D.C. area. After spotting an ad in the local paper, he called the landlord who described what sounded like the perfect apartment over the phone. But when David showed up to meet the landlord and tour the apartment, he was told it was no longer available. David suspects that the landlord would rather not rent to him because of his race.

If you don’t have much to spend on your upcoming move, you’ve probably ruled out the possibility of hiring a moving company. It’s common sense: your move will be much cheaper if you find a cheap rental truck, even when you factor in the cost of gas, tolls, food, and lodging throughout your trip. Your moving truck rental will probably be your most significant cost. If you’re on a tight budget, is it possible to negotiate a better price and score a cheap moving truck? Depending on how flexible you are, the answer is probably yes.

Why use ApartmentSearch by CORT to find your next apartment?*

Finding a new apartment is supposed to cost you money, right? It probably will if you search for apartments the traditional way. But if you use ApartmentSearch by CORT to find your next apartment, you can actually make $200! Read more to learn how ApartmentSearch.com can help you find a great apartment and earn money at the same time.

1. Explore properties at ApartmentSearch.com. ApartmentSearch is a great way to explore housing options in your new city. Over 18,000 apartment complexes across the country have agreements with ApartmentSearch and the number grows every day. “We have a national team of salespeople whose goal is to target properties and expand the ApartmentSearch network,” says Creed Poore, Intellectual Property Manager for ApartmentSearch. Log on to the site to check out complexes in your destination city.

After you’ve found that perfect apartment to move into, the rental application you may have to submit is easy to forget about. You fill in your contact information, check a few boxes and hope for a positive phone call in the coming days. While most renters assume their landlords know something about their histories, most don’t know quite how much a landlord can learn about you from your rental application.

When choosing an apartment, diligent renters pepper landlords and real-estate agents with questions about square footage, amenities and security deposits. However, few renters consider the air quality in potential apartments. Most of us don’t think about the quality of the air we breathe at all — until we begin to suspect that the air in our apartments might be making us sick. As we learn more about how air quality affects common diseases like asthma and with new concerns about “sick building syndrome” in office complexes, more and more people are starting to take air quality seriously.

No matter how good a deal you have on your rent, eventually you’ll hear about someone who has it better. And then just when you start to feel bad for yourself, you’ll meet someone who’s paying an arm and a leg for a place much smaller than yours. When you think about the wide range of rents in your city, you’ll start to wonder –- how do landlords figure out how much to charge?