Hello
In the next couple of months, I'll be moving into rented accomodation for the first time. There's four of us looking to share. Me, my girlfriend and two mates. So even though there's four of us, we'll be needing a three bedroom place
Say we see a place we want that £2,000 a month. What's generally the accepted way of dividing that fairly? If you did it four ways, obvs that'd be £500 each. But as there's only three rooms, should it not be divided three ways, rather than by the amount of people?
Obviously all bills will split four ways, but as far as rent goes, what's the general concensus?
split it equally
Between the amount of people?
that's what i'd do
you're not paying per room are you. you pay for the house.
by that logic
anyone can go into anyone else's room whenever they like
that can happen regardless
of who pays what
yeah
Evenly.
Don't forget, you're not just paying for the bedrooms - you're paying for kitchen, living room and suchlike as well.
divide per room... square footage etc...
not per person.
hmmm... conflicting advice
Presumably then there's no 'official way' of doing this?
do not do this
So if someone has a tiny room and someone has a large room they should pay the same?
That's utterly retarded.
You ALWAYS divide rent first and foremost on the basis of the size of each bedroom.
get bent
you divide it up equally and then if the rooms differ that much in size you can work out if some people want to pay more for the bigger rooms or less for the smaller ones. If no one wants to do that then you just pick names out of a hat for each room.
Well yeah but that's what I mean.
How could anyone not claim they'd pay more for a bigger room in order to get that room.
I don't see how it could be fair any other way. The bigger room should be a higher rent. We've always done it that way with a difference of 5 or 10 quid a week between the rooms depending on the total rent and the size difference of the rooms. One place we were in the biggest bedroom was 3-4 times the size of the smallest.
it's the number of people
that are the problem. If there are two rooms the same size and one room has one lonely nerd in it and the other has 5 members of a dance troupe in should they just pay per room?
Well actually I'd say yes.
Only because it's the choice of the five people in a dance troupe to have that one room and moreover because ther other people in the house presumable have agreed to live with five complete nutcases.
As with the couple thing: I wouldn't choose to live with a couple who wanted to share one room between them if I felt hard done by that they were only paying for one room. To my mind splitting the utilities between each person is entirely logical but beyond that they're putting themselves out by having one room. And I'm agreeing to it in the first place so I must be okay with rooms being shared in that manner.
The question of room size itself is different. As I said below, I'd both feel guilty to get the biggest room for no extra cost and irritated to be cramped into a small room for the same rate. I don't see how anyone couldn't feel the same way unless it was a house full of people who owned nothing and never spent any time at home...
let's say you're the nerd
would you be happy waiting around to use the bathroom each morning after all members of the troupe have had a clear out and a shower?
No, but that's because I wouldn't choose to live in that situation.
It's got nothing to do with the size of the rooms and the rent.
This isn't the same as if a flatmate decides to have their partner just live in your place without consulting you at all. That's bang out of order because you're effectively changing the deal.
But presumably if someone did decide they were happy to live in that situation and then got unhappy about the bathroom use I'd have no sympathy for them. If the rooms were of equal size I'd expect each to have the same rent, but the utilities/Council Tax/etc. would be split 6 ways.
....
Why not split it so that everyone benefit, £2000/3 would be £660 p/m and £2000/4 would be £500 a month. If you and your girlfriend agree to pay £400 each and the others £600 ye all win. They get a cheaper rent per room, and you 2 get the biggest room, at a cheaper deal.
If this doesn't make sense I apologise.
Careful
or you'll enter "but I've got the smallest room" territory. Just divide it equally.
How is that bad territory, though?
If someone has a smaller room they should pay less.
But it never works that way
I've never done it any other way and it's never been a problem.
Are you maths deficient?
No
The landlord has always set the rent at an equal amount no matter the size of the room.
We always just told them how it was going to be paid
and did it that way, or just all paid one person by DD and they pay the landlord in one sum the day after.
honestly?
I don't care, my days of house-sharing are hopefully behind me.
The room size disparity in the shared places I've lived in
would make me feel guilty to have the biggest room at the same rent as the smallest and annoyed to have the smallest room at the same rate as the biggest.
but what if everyone wants the
smallest room cos they don't want to pay loads? Someone might end up with a big room they don't want that costs them more than they wanted to pay. Just split it evenly and get over it.
Well if everyone's that hard up
you're obviously looking in the wrong place to live, surely?
ok then
x
As you can tell
I've never encountered any situation where everyone wants the smallest room. I've known one person want it if they could pay less as they were the hardest up of all of us. The flipside to that was that one person was always prepared to pay extra to secure the larger room to balance that.
This also resulted in the rest of us who'd like the larger room not feeling hard done by.
I think that if everyone 100% agrees
with the proposed way of dividing the rent then do whatever you feel like.
Exactly
If you don't get along well enough to discuss and agree on this sort of thing, then you don't get along well enough to live together, end of.
Theo is right
I agree with him 100%
ok then
x
i AGREE WITH tHEO
Hmmm.
Evenly. Everyone living in the house should be paying the rent.
^ this
in my first shared flat there was a couple living in one room and only paid rent for the one room (the girl joined a bit later) and it annoyed me to no end.
I understand this
But as we're all going in at the same time, it's not like somebody is jumping in and free loading the existing people
Maybe if me and my chica take the biggest room, pay more for it (i.e £650 rather than £500), that way the other two get their rent a bit cheaper too
Or is that just getting too complicated?
maybe one of you could pay half rent?
i don't know.
Why would that be too complicated?
As long as the other people in the house think thats fair, it would be pretty easy to set up
Usualy
the rent is pre set by the agency or landlord so that everyone pays the same amount, this is both to keep the sanity of the house around annnd so that if one person doesnt pay a bill hes sure to loose £280 instead of potentially a larger sum because... o i cant explain it.. equally
split per person
and you get choice of biggest room
^
^ this.
If you push it for per room, then you'll only upset people and lead to "Well if you only want to pay for a room, get a fucking bedsit together."
yes - go evenly .. divide by number of people, not rooms
you're all living there so you should all pay.
Well, we are all going to pay
I did almost exactly the same thing
and me and my girlfriend paid together
which apparently was an awesome deal
woo hoo £150 rent a month
You should pay £500 each
and split the bills between 4 people, and you and your girlfriend should get the biggest room. You still share all the other facilities between 4 and its worth a few extra quid to avoid resentment of you guys having it better for being a couple.
But I would actually suggest
getting a 4 bedroom place. How are you supposed to keep 2 peoples' worldly possessions in one room without going crazy!?
I agree, to be honest
:)
dicide it equally between the four of you
divide*
Divide it by 3
then take 15% of each of the singleton's share and add it to the couple's joint rent.
if that makes sense?
Yes, it does
I've suggested something similar up there somewhere
half for the communal, half for the rooms
£2000 all in
£250 each for the communal space
£333 for each room
your friends pay £583 a month
you pay £417 a month.
obvs all bills 4 ways.
the only bit of that that's debatable afaic is the split between communal and private rooms. someone like jack_el_biscuit is basically saying that its 100% communal, 0% private space. i'd suggest 50/50 but there's obviously different viewpoints for different houses with different bedrooms/livingrooms.
however, this is all assuming that the landlord doesn't know/care how many people live in his house.
I didn't say that but thanks anyway
yes you did
if you say that everyone should pay equally, despite sharing a bedroom, you're saying that the rooms are irrelevant and that all you're paying for is the communal space. i chose you cos you were the first person to answer with that
No I'm not
I'm just saying you should pay per person, your bedrooms are private and the communal spaces are communal.
ur st00pid
thanks
yeah this sounds fair
i'd go for a rounded figure so you don't look like an uber-geek.
i'd probably round it up on the couples' side
and down on the others cos that gap is a bit much really
maybe
£450+450+525+525
to be utterley fair
id suggest the 2 of you pay a 40% share and the other 2 30% each.
what about
you get a 4 room place and you and your girlfriend sublet the boxroom/use it as a walk-in closet/weed growing room/torture chamber
??
I've just got a 2 bedroom flat with a mate and my girlfriend
Me and her are paying £377 a month, our mate is paying £417. It would have been massively unfair for him if he paid for half the flat and considering my girlfriend and I have less space, it would have been a bit unfair to split it three ways.
The important thing is though, because we are all mates, no party intended in ripping the other off, and we all knew what would be fair and what would be unfair.
So if you are all actually good mates, sit down and have a chat about it. You can easily come to an arrangment that isn't paying per room or per person.
*£377 a month each, obviously
LOL threeways
There was a space between 'three' and 'ways', moron
You know, like that space between your ears where a brain should have been.
you've got to split it equally
being the couple, surely you'll be getting the largest room anyway?
i take your point about getting less space than others per person, but realistically, you're dealing with people, and with a housesharing situation, which, even with your best friends, can bring out all sorts of tensions. paying unequal rent is one of the quickest ways to bring about tension, and if you did decide to do it another way, you couldn't be sure it wouldn't go wrong.
it'd be a little different if you weren't a couple i think. i've lived in houses where rent is determined by room size, but they've all been single people. in the house that you're moving into, you and your girlfriend are a unit, and the other two are individuals. there's already a danger there. you don't want to compound it.
i realise that you, your flatmates and girlfriend are all (probably?) perfectly nice, normal, reasonable people, but these things do come up in the best of situations. my advice is not to tempt fate, money's not worth damaging friendships or relationships over.
you'll be communicating
with each other exclusively through post-it notes within a month
^^ I agree. If I were moving in with a couple
or was a couple moving in with single people the first thing I'd ask is how the rent would be split.
Clearly everyone's view is different and more importantly, even if you came back from here and said to the other two "There were 69 posts to 2 saying we split the rent 3 ways" if they don't think that then it's tough titties.
wait until the food arguments start
they're grate
the picture you're painting
is not dependent upon the two singles - the couple can achieve this level of maleficence on their own
^ This
I didn't even start looking until I'd discussed how we all felt about rent.
Frankly, its a little sad and alot hilarious how alien an idea it seems here for housesharers to (especially if they are supposed to be friends) to do maths a little more complicated than dividing by 3 or 4.
yeah but
there's a difference between a hypothetical scenario and an actual house
if they find a place where all 3 rooms are of equal size it's a whole different story from somewhere with a huge master bedroom that opens onto a quiet courtyard and a tiny boxroom that opens onto the holloway rd
Not really
It depends how grown up they all are. The size of the rooms doesn't matter
every little thing will matter
oi that's not the communal cordial that's my own fucking Ribena you gump
Yeah, but this misses my point
IF you are all REALLY friends and IF all of you are sensible and mature enough to no the difference between fair and unfair, then you SHOULD be fine.
People that descend into those sort of arguments are pathetic and they have nothing to do with living with/as part of a couple and everything to do with being either a miserly or theiving cunt
You nicked the ribena, didn't you?
You can own up to it now.
I didn't open or finish it though
I played within the rules
nice
or having a bad day
or being a little bit absent minded
or being on the rag
or being hungover or generally moody etc.
or bringing someone back from a party who canes the communal milk
etc
ad infinitum
I refer you back
to my point about you being friends with your housemates. If you really are and are capable of having grown-up conversations, house stuff will be fine
and if one person's situation changes?
crdit crucnh?
Positivity is a fine thing and I admire it but you have to plan for the worst case scenario
In your dynamic you and your lady outnumber the single so I guess will never feel threatened
but in the dynamic d_f_a is ruminating on there is far more room for friction
there are plenty of other possible dynamics too of course
Well I'm not claiming there is a rule
for this kind of situation.
As I've said above somewhere, if the lot of you (girlfriend or no girlfriend, master bedroom or no master bedroom) don't get along well enough to discuss issues like this, then you don't get along well enough to live together. And yeah, situations can change and there are infinite variables, but they can't really be accounted for.
yeah
fair enough
for me it's been 7 or more years since I lived in a house share but even now casting my mind back makes me shudder
it will happen
people can be the greatest of friends but it's only a matter of time before bread is stolen, cliques are formed and scart cables are hidden.
Nah
It happens a whole lot I'll admit, but it doesn't have to happen. I've lived in houseshares where everything gone smoothly
me too
i currently live in a totally harmonious houseshare, just me and a couple.
i think it's really important that everyone feels on equal pegging as individuals though, and don't feel like the couple is privileged or dominant in any way, which is a very easy thing to happen, even among civilised adults and friends. housesharing is a strange situation and it's never clear from the outset how people are going to react to it. sometimes the most ideal seeming shares can degenerate into horror, and sometimes apparently terrible matches end up working well.
as you said, it's all about talking it out with your friends and being reasonable about everything. we had a big finance talk before moving in, it's essential. i do reckon though that a significant imbalance in who pays what rent is a good way to start off on completely the wrong foot, especially if you're the couple.
Exactly
I don't understand why everyone seems to see housesharing in such definite terms.
but
didn't you see the way your girlfriend was looking at your flatmate?
*SAFETY WINK*
Not the scart cables!
bastards. Next it'll be passwords on all the computers.
I dunno.
I just know I'd never get into this situation. Cheers.
I don't miss house sharing
i've just had to do this
half the rent divided by 3 (three bedrooms)
+ half the rent divided by 4 (4 people)
seems like the fairest way to me
"Don't live with couples"
but as you are a couple, I think one of the in-between methods seems fairest
equally
between all participants.
Divide the rent
by the number of rooms the house has, thus giving each room a 'price'.
Everyone in the house pays their share of all reception rooms, plus a bedroom.
This is badly explained, but means that you're all paying rent for most of the house, but you and the gf are splitting the cost of your room...
Alcxxk explained this better than me
It's the fairest way of doing it.
£500 each
definitely.
oh yeah
ad living with couples is never a good idea. no offence.
i'd like to say 'the couple' pay a touch higher
so the singles pay £571 each and the couple pay £857 between them. but the problem culd come in if one person leaves and a new person comes in, or more specifically, if the couple leave and a new single person comes in, a rent hike of almost £100 would be a lot to take...
wow
this thread is so revealing!
i'd never move in with people who'd consider it fair for the rent to be split evenly for each person when two of them are sharing a bedroom.
alcxxk & fionapinkstars are totally onto it - it's a share of communal space plus a price for the bedroom, but i do think bedroom size should also be taken into account. i would be very resentful of having the tiniest room and paying the same as someone with the big one.
why would couples ever want to move in together if not for it being more financially viable? oh right, all that love stuff...
yeah, but the couple chose to share a bedroom
It's not a given - if I had to move in with my non-existent boyfriend in a shared house, I'd probably still want my own bedroom.
yes, and that choice has made the rent cheaper
for everybody. three bedroom houses cost less than four bedroom houses.
and?
I still think the rent should be equally split between four people, thus not making it cheaper unless a four bedroom was a previous option.
Obviously, friends can come to arrangements, but it's a HOUSE. All in all, if you want to save money as a couple, move into a studio flat.
split it equally
you take the biggest room.
it's been said before, but i wanted to repeat it. it's the most surefire way to avoid arguments. also, do your own food shopping.
split it equally
as you and your girlfriend will also be using the bathroom, living room, and kitchen.
I've had flatmates moving their boyfriends and in, and splitting the rent with them....which would be fine, apart from when they take up all the communal space and act annoying.
Sorry - if you are all good friends, you could probably come to some deal, where you and your gf pay slightly less. But if you have a very big room between you, you should probably split equally.
...
Everyone pays £500 each and anyone saying different is cautioned about being a twat. End of thread.
Plus, whatever you agree
make sure you get everything down in writing / some form of contract.
seriously tho
the couple choosing to live together are lowering the price of the whole place for everyone, in return for not having their own rooms. to expect them to pay equally is ungrateful and shit.
I don't understand this
they are also getting the benefit of all the communal spaces though, they probably wouldn't have otherwise.
they also don't want their own rooms, so its not like a sacrifice.
dont want their own rooms?
like anyone on earth wouldn't choose to have a room for free if it was offered to them, be it for storage, a study, a fishtank, whatever
yeah, but that hardly ever happens
I've just had shit experiences of when couples have moved in (usually when saving for a house) and been a real pain in the ass, without even paying their share.
On the other hand, I've had friends' boyfriends move in and they've paid the rent equally, despite sharing a room with their partner.
Friends can always come to arrangements, though.
its unreasonable
for someone to move in somewhere permanently and not pay any rent, but equally it's unreasonable for someone to have to pay the same as someone else when they don't have their own room
if the couple offered, I wouldn't say no
it's about having a larger space than you do if you were renting either a studio flat, or a one-bedroom place (certainly in London, anyway)
I'd be okay if it was friends, but the split couldn't be too substantial.
You talk a lot of sense
I may have you draw up my next rental agreement...
i actually invented a system for perfect rent split
it involved having everyone mark the rooms out of ten and stuff
I always read the title of this thread
'Dividing rent fairy' and all the time think 'wow, a fairy does this for us! how cool!'
You all pay the fucking same
If you argue otherwise then odds are you're a student or have spent too much of your life living with your mum & dad.
but you spend £8 a day on food
so your interpretations on any financial matter are pretty fucked up
I've been in this situation
we split the rent per person but the couple got the biggest room to share, no debate. I think it's fairest - closest to same amount of 'space' per person. Paying half the rent of your mates is only going to cause greivances when there's still an extra person using the bathroom/kitchen/sofa etc.
This thread is stupid