My young adult daughter, Curly Girl, is moving into a new apartment with her husband and my grandson and it’s been a whirlwind of activity.

On my part, it’s mostly been collecting paperwork, because it turns out that my daughter and her husband don’t make enough money on paper to rent this modest 2-bedroom apartment in the hinterlands. (She gets much of her income from tips.)

Apparently, only Warren Buffett makes enough money to rent this apartment, (he’s worth $128 billion) and they probably wouldn’t give it to him either without a virtual blizzard of financial disclosures and a whole suitcase full of money. And that’s just for the application.

It cost the kids $253 to apply for this dwelling. And that’s merely the application fee. It doesn’t mean they’d actually get it. That’s more than I paid per month for my first apartment — although admittedly that was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Still that seems flat-out insane to me. And a perfect example of how the rich keep getting richer, by ripping off the rest of us every chance they get.

Admittedly, I haven’t rented an apartment since I bought my first house in 1999, so I don’t know how things are out there, but I do know that real estate investors keep getting richer and richer and the remaining 98% of us are getting poorer and poorer.

Then these investors collect expensive art for their own enjoyment, endow an art museum when they’re tired of it, name it after themselves, and everyone calls them wonderful philanthropists. Think I’m exaggerating? I could give you a list off the top of my head.

Some of you are saying “Well, she didn’t have to apply for that particular apartment.” But it is perfect for them with family amenities and sort-of-almost affordable. Nothing is actually affordable for young people these days unless you want to get buried in snow in Montana, or live with survivalists in Idaho.

Anyway, since Bill Gates wasn’t available, Curly Girl and her husband asked me if I’d co-sign for them and I happily agreed, because my daughter has always been financially responsible and I sympathize with her plight.

In fact, she has a higher credit rating than most people older than she is, because she’s so careful with her money. Apparently, in the rarified world of apartment leasing, that’s irrelevant.

Meanwhile, I didn’t realize that agreeing to co-sign for her was going to plunge me into a nightmarish vortex of prying questions and the need to send them bank statements, pay statements, photos of my drivers license (front and back), an online camera taking a picture of me and more.

I’ve been waiting for them to demand a photo of the inside of my bowels.

They somehow lost most of the stuff I uploaded to them, so I had to send it all again. What are they? The IRS?

What’s crazy to me is that I know any bank out there would glance at my credit rating and that I own two houses and immediately hand me a big chunk of money. I get offers in the mail like that all the time.

But the people who own this apartment building practically want to strip search me, just so my kid can live there. (Not that I care about that. After having cancer for five years, so many strangers have seen me undressed that I could walk down the street naked without a thought.)

This whole experience has made me wish I had enough money to help the kids out, especially because Curly Girl will soon have a second baby. Yes, that’s right. This one’s a girl. We went shopping yesterday for her first-ever living room couch, and I had to explain to her to never, ever buy a white couch, especially with kids and dogs.

My daughter never asks me for money. It’s a source of pride to her. But I don’t even know how young people get along out there. Unfortunately for her, I’m a newspaper journalist, which is a notoriously underpaid profession. Clearly, I should have gone into real estate investing. (Actually, I have a friend who left journalism to do just that and guess what? She’s rich as Croesus now.)

Fisher writes a humor column for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune in West Covina, Calif. She may be contacted at mfisher@scng.com.

TNS