Splitting Bills with a Roommate

Paying bills is never fun. Having a roommate, or more than one, can make bill-paying much less stressful… or much more. Here are some tips for managing apartment bill-paying among roommates.

Types of apartment bills
You’ll encounter three types of bills: monthly bills for a fixed amount; monthly bills for which the amount varies every month; and variable bills. Your rent will almost certainly be the first type of bill. The second type includes most utility bills, although some may be a fixed amount, such as your cable bill or your gas bill if you choose a fixed-rate plan. The third type will include everything from groceries to cleaning supplies to repair bills on shared items. With each type of bill, you have to decide how you’ll split costs and how you’ll handle the actual payments.

Work out the details
Rent may be the easiest bill to handle, since you know how much it will be and when it will be due. You may also be able to handle utilities through separate payments, although you run the risk of everyone’s power being turned off if one roommate is late paying his or her share of the power bill. You may be able to decide whether to put the utilities in the name of everyone on the lease or just one roommate.

Have someone in charge of bills?
Another way to handle bills is to designate one roommate as the bill-payer and have other roommates pay or reimburse him or her. If one roommate feels better having control over the process, this may be the best strategy. Be warned, though, that while things can be tense if one roommate owes money to the apartment community or the power company, they can be even worse if one roommate owes money to another.

Make an agreement
If you end up being the one who pays the bills, you may want to spell out in a roommate agreement what happens if one of your roommates falls short. What if one roommate is the one always talking on the phone? You might want to agree early on that, even if you’re dividing up bills equally to start, that’s subject to change if one person is responsible for increasing a bill. Similarly, one roommate might take on the bill for the extra cable channels or super-fast Internet access that he or she wants.

When all is said and done, you might end up owed, or owing, a few dollars, because you and your roommates are human and may make a mistake or two. For the benefit of long-term roommate harmony, you might let the occasional difference of a couple dollars slide. But if you feel you’re being taken advantage of, speak up about it quickly, rather than feeling resentful for a long time.