Roommates keep tabs on shared bills

When most roommates complain about each other’s snooze alarms, it’s because they feel the noise is interrupting their own beauty sleep.

For third-year political science student Nicole Schiro, however, the complaint her roommates had was that by constantly hitting the snooze button, she was using more electricity.

While splitting bills may seem like a straightforward task, students are typically dealing with tight budgets and thin wallets.

Add to that the difficulty of keeping track of rent checks, utility bills and grocery expenses, along with the sometimes difficult task of having to ask friends for money, and the process of settling even minor debts can become a major problem for some roommates.

For Schiro, though, who has a single room in the two-bedroom apartment she shares with two friends, a simple discussion was enough to resolve the issue of trying to figure out whether anyone was using more than her fair share of the electricity.

“They’re all just trying to save money, but it’s impossible to tell” how much electricity is being used, Schiro said. “We’re all paying for it, so use what you’re going to use.”

In terms of paying bills, Schiro pays slightly more for rent each month because she has the single room, and since all of the utilities are in her name, her roommates write her single checks to cover their third of rent and utilities.

Schiro said, “They pay me and I pay the bills, which only works if you’re friends, because you don’t want to get screwed.”

Other students may have a more relaxed system of settling their debts, at least for more minor purchases.

Fourth-year physiology student Raymond Kung lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Atrium Court with three friends. Kung explained that since he and his roommates have similar tastes in food, they take turns purchasing groceries, then keep all of their receipts.

The friends assume they are spending about the same amount and wait until the end of the year to divide the bills.

“We’re really up front with each other, so it’s really easy. If we owe each other money, we let each other know,” Kung said.

The four roommates are testing a system for paying rent that is different from the one they used last year. Instead of taking turns paying a full month’s rent, one roommate now writes a check to the landlord and has the other three roommates pay him for their shares.

“We’re doing that right now; it’s kind of annoying to keep up with that many checks,” Kung said. “But it works.”

For roommates who are less comfortable asking each other to settle debts, the solution may be online.

Users of BillMonk.com log all of their shared expenses and let the site calculate who owes whom what. BillMonk also allows users to make cell phone payments through a partnership with Obopay.com.

Gaurav Oberoi, who cofounded BillMonk with his friend Chuck Groom, said he developed the idea after taking a trip to Europe. After the trip, Oberoi and his friends e-mailed a spreadsheet of their expenses back and forth to try to figure out who owed what.

“It occurred to me that it would be easier … instead of having a piece of paper stuck to a door” to have a centralized place to log expenses, Oberoi said.

“Along with the settling up component, with Obopay, that would just complete the picture,” he added.

Oberoi and Groom’s vision was to make settling debts among friends as convenient and painless as possible.

“With BillMonk you can kind of tell us what happened and not have to do the math,” Oberoi said.

“Roommates write in to us that they had tiffs like “˜I always buy the milk,'” said Oberoi, who thinks that BillMonk eliminates potential awkwardness.

“Even though the dollar amount can be small, the friction can be huge” when having to ask for money, he said.

BillMonk can also be helpful because it allows users to send “friendly third-person reminders” from the site when other users owe them money.

As for trying to figure out who’s always paying for the milk, BillMonk responded to user requests by adding an itemized bill feature to show detailed descriptions of specific bills.

Arjun Banker, a BillMonk.com user based in Seattle, said that the site adds “a layer of social buffer, if you will ““ it just makes it so you don’t have to pester (friends) for money.”

Although Banker currently uses the Web site with his two roommates, he thinks he would have benefited even more if BillMonk had existed before he graduated four years ago. “For people in college, money is a bigger issue; people are trying to keep track of it.”

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