If you are sharing an apartment or a house with several roommates, deciding how to split the rent can be challenging. A new rent calculator can help.
One of the staples in college life that often continues until you become established in your career is sharing your living space with a roommate or two. The problem is that deciding how to split the rent when rooms are different sizes and when some people share rooms with a partner can be tricky. The old rule was to just divide the rent equally among the people who live in the space, but when you have a less desirable room and pay the same as someone who has a great room, it is easy for resentment and anger to set in.
In an effort to make sharing living space a little bit easier, a new website Splittherent.org has come up with a rental calculator that takes all of these variables into consideration and comes up with an amount that is fair for each person.
When it comes to dividing the rent, the rent sharing calculator looks first at the most common way to evaluate real estate, price per square foot. Then, it splits the cost of the bedrooms by the number of people who are sleeping there. Next, it splits the common areas equally for each person who lives in the home. This method makes it fair for people who have a smaller bedroom and for people who share a room and/or have a larger room.
What makes this calculator really interesting is that after it has determined the cost for each person, it then looks at features and amenities of each room. For example, some rooms have windows with great views, while others may not have any windows at all. If you have some rooms that have private baths or rooms with huge closets, this is factored in as well. All of these features have been assigned a value based on a survey of what people are willing to pay for certain upgrades.
Whether you are sharing your space with a stranger you found on Craigslist or another roommate locator site or you are sharing your home with friends, being able to come up with a way to share the expenses while still being fair to everyone is very important for long term happiness. And, we all know that there isn't much else that can make your life as miserable as having a bad relationship with your roomates.
Now, if only they had a housework splitting calculator...
What do you think of this rent sharing formula? Have you ever felt that dividing the rent equally was unfair? Let me know in the comments.
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By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for CollegeJobBankBlog. Along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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