Check to see if your employer would be open to flex hours, job sharing or telecommuting. If so, you may be able to use these to juggle your schedule and cut your child care costs.

If both you and your spouse work, see if it's possible to arrange your work schedules so they overlap as little as possible. This will allow you to reduce number of hours your child has to spend at child care.

See if there is a relative or good friend that can help with child care.

Consider hiring a nanny and sharing cost of child care with a few good friends. This will allow you to pay less individually for child care costs and nanny will make more money overall.

For a list of child care resource and referral agencies, you can visit Child Care Aware website - http://www.childcareaware.org - which is a nonprofit organization that helps parents find quality child care in their communities.

You may or may not want to include a question in application about whether or not he or she plans to get (or has) any pets. If your tenant has 2 Dobermans and plans on moving into a 500 square foot space with no yard... you may not want to rent to them. Not only could large pets cause expensive damages or stink up apartment, but it’s also unfair to animals! Do you want to rent to someone who cares that little for living creatures?

You will also need to have a clause in your rental application stating that you have right to perform criminal, personal and financial background checks on prospective tenants. If this clause is not present in tenant's signed application, you have no legal right to contact anyone from their past.

Once you've talked to past employers and landlords, you should be able to determine whether or not applicant would be a good addition to your establishment. If it looks like they have a good chance, you'll want to run a credit report on them to make double sure of your instinct.

Credit reports can be expensive ($35.00 - $50.00), so it's a good idea to only run them on applicants you've researched and feel good about. Some credit checking agencies will give discounted reports to landlords ($10.00 - $20.00) and if you would like to, you can ask your potential tenant to pay for some or all of credit report cost.

By checking out everything from past employees to credit, you will have enough information about applicant to decide whether or not you are going to accept application. The process may seem tedious, but finding out about a bad tenant before he lives in your complex is well worth your efforts.