u/Far-Childhood2999

Applying for a rental in the Bay Area. I saw the home in person during an open house (there were lots of other interested people present as well), chatted with the property manager, and then submitted an application via the online portal the property manager provided for their agency (Legacy Property Management of Silicon Valley). I had already googled the company, and it had a lot of positive reviews and seemed completley legitimate. After I submitted my application, which asked for my landlords contact info, my landlord also received a link to separately verify my rental history.

Today, I receive a seperate email from a company called 'Rent Rank' which says that creating an account with them is required as a 'mandatory part of the tenant screening process' and that my application for the rental cannot be processed with it. The description in the email says you create a free account, and then they send a link to your landlord to verify your rental history -- but this is odd because my landlord already this.

The address listed at the bottom of the email is: 548 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94104. I tried searching for whether a company called Rent Rank is located in that building, and don't see anything.

The email was marked as suspicious in my gmail, and I cannot find a single website or reference to Rent Rank online. I'm worried I just got scammed by submitting an application for this property.

Looking for some motivation or hope that my spouse can still financially thrive. They are FM, went to a Caribbean med school and racked up about $700k(!) in student loans. I was strongly pushing for PSLF and believed it was the only viable path forward given their debt to income ratio; but it was 2018/2019 and spouse felt like the program was too uncertain. They chose to go with a non-PSLF role and refinanced all their federal loans to private for a lower rate. This choice would come to haunt us - 2020 hit and all payments on fed loans were paused, PSLF ended up being a viable program providing forgiveness AND to add insult to injury, Borrowers Defense was enacted for their Caribbean school (forgiving all fed schools for those schools). But because loans had been refinanced to private, we weren't able to utilize any of these things. This has felt absolutely crushing.

It's been 10 years of them working and throwing nearly their entire salary at the debt. There's $150k left at < 3%. I know this is great progress, but I am so mentally and emotionally drained by this loan. Spouse is 40, they have thankfully been putting money towards their retirement, but everything else feels significantly delayed (investing in a brokerage account, saving for a home, 529 for our child etc). I have been carrying the financial load in those areas and am exhausted from it.

Is there hope here? We are also in a VHCOL city, where basic existence is incredibly expensive. Would greatly appreciate stories of folks paying off massive loan sums, and still feeling like they are thriving in life (not just surviving and getting by). I know we are going to survive, but I feel like this has completely altered the trajectory of our lives in a very negative way. I have tried so hard to not feel defeated by this, but there are more low days than high ones this far into the process.