Last weekend Mr. Be-Mine, Car Enthusiast, Fashionist, Latest Beau one of my best friends who we’ll call The Councilor since she’s in grad school to be a career councilor plus a few other friends who will remain nameless since my creativity was used up after “The Councilor”, went to dinner and we were talking about Fashionist’s and mine apartment since we’d just moved in. They were curious to know how come Fashionist got the master bedroom and bathroom. I explained that Fashionist had requested it and offered to pay more based upon square footage.
Fashionist and I had already long since talked about how we were going to allocate bedrooms. In our previous apartment in the college ghetto the two bedrooms were nearly identical (her’s slightly larger but next to a neighbor and mine slightly smaller but surrounded by our apartment so noise was less) and shared a bathroom so we just split rent and we were both content with that.
This time we knew that the apartments we were going to be looking at would be different and have a master bedroom and a second bedroom. Fashionist, being the fashion diva that she is, requested to have the master but said she’s be willing to pay more for it based on square footage. The was fine by me, I’ve never had “master bed room” before so it was no big deal, plus I liked the idea of having a little less expensive rent, since the ½ way point for the rent of the apartments we were looking at was near the top end of what I wanted to pay. All and all we were both happy.
After explaining this Mr. Be-mine and Car Enthusiast had a field day making fun of us. Fashionist and I are both a little on the anal retentive side (probably why we are such good roommates together) so they couldn’t believe we’d gone thru the effort of calculating the square footage etc.
The Councilor, always being the peace maker said who care’s as long as the two of them are happy that’s all the matters – which I firmly believe. It makes both Fashionist and I happy – we have a planned method of how to share rent and it wasn’t based off a coin flip or anything so there’s no possibility of resentment. We do however split utilities 50/50 which I think is reasonable as well.
For all of you that split rent I thought I’d also give you a few links for tips about how to calculate rents:
Sylvia at About gives a formula for figuring rents
Hope these help!
3 comments:
I was kind of in the same setup, the house we rented had varying sized rooms, and 2 car garage. One person had to park outside, but got a larger room, then we adjusted slightly for the room differences. But... we didnt calculate the square footage differences, adding in the square footage value of a garage parking space, interesting though.
@ Philip - Did you all pay different rent amounts or just exchange different amenities to make it all essentially even?
In response to Future Millionaire -- if you pay different rent amounts, instead of "exchange different amenities" (I presume you mean that different people are responsible for different utility bills to make it all come out) there is an easier and more accurate way.
Use http://slackerfactor.com/ , and have everyone put in all the bills they happen to pay. The site will tell you how much each person should pay to everyone else.
Even better, if the bills don't come out evenly, every few months "slacker" can pay an extra bill he normally does not, and the site will keep track that it all comes out even.
One disadvantage is that if people are paying different amounts for rent, because one person has the bigger room like in this post, then the person who paid the landloard has to enter two rent transactions in, but if it was split evenly then they could just enter in one and check each person's name. The site is supposed to add the non-even splitting feature at some point, however.
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