Splinting rents with a roommate

A roommate could be anybody of your choice – a buddy or acquaintance or a colleague at work. If you want to avoid drama, do not room with a total stranger. You should also be careful among the friends or relatives that you select as a roommate. It is challenging to actually live with someone whom you are not related to. Hence take time to find a compatible roommate.

But once you have made the choice, the next item is to discuss finances before you sign the lease. Most important is how do you split the rent?

One of the advantages of having a roommate is the ability to share the rent which means you get to save money. It is a financial necessity. It also means you can go for a much larger apartment with better amenities than you could if you were living by yourself.

Hence, defining how you will split the rent and other expenses from the beginning ensures the no one feels cheated. Experts say that splitting costs evenly is one of the best ways to avoid conflict. Hence you may consider looking for a house with equal sizes and amenities. There will still be some items that may be shared such as kitchen area, trash bags, dish soap and household cleaning products. Split the cost of replacing the items though.

In a situation where one person has more amenities than the other, the house comes with extra amenities or the size of the rooms is not equal it will not make sense to split the rent in half or equally.

In the case of unequal room sizes, consider splitting the cost by square footage. The best way to achieve this is to take the square footage of each bedroom and divide by the total square footage of the apartment. You will arrive at the percentage of space each room occupies. Apply each individual percentage to the total cost of rent and you have your bills.

Second, apart from the rooms, consider the amenities and extra perks. The roommate that gets the master bedroom with a walk-in closet and an attached bathroom should pay more than the roommate with the smaller closet and shared bathroom.

There is also the issue of how one roommate feels about utilities. If you are the type that loves to watch cable TV – a sports fanatic and the other roommate likes to be locked in the room and study or prefers cable news, then discuss what is fair.

For utilities such as gas, electric, waste bills you may choose to split it by the average of the bills or by months. That is, one roommate pays for a month while the other chooses the coming month.

Who handles the bills should be clear between the both of you. You do not want to create a situation where one roommate hopes the waste management bill has been settled only to find out in a rude way it hasn’t or electricity is cut by the power company because either of the roommate were thinking the other had settled the bill.

When you have ironed out the details of the shared expenses draft an agreement. The point of writing it down is to save the unnecessary arguments that may arise should one roommate defaults. Finally make copies for each tenant.