Living with Roommates

You are finally moved in and ready to begin living in your new place. Here comes the real fun...living day-to-day with your roommates. To make this experience a positive one, you might consider how you and your roommates will divide up the housework, food shopping, and bills.

Some options for dividing up the housework and food shopping are as follows:

1. Make a monthly chart with rotating jobs on it. That way no one person gets stuck doing the dirty work all the time.
2. Pull jobs out of a hat. The idea is to make the division of these sometimes unpleasant tasks as fair as possible.

Some people have never had to deal with paying bills before. Before you move in, it’s very important to talk about how you and your roommates will pay the bills. Usually, a particular bill can only be placed in one person’s name. Inevitably this holds that one person responsible for the payment of this bill and can adversely affect his/her credit rating if it is not paid on time.

Some options for setting up utility accounts are as follows:

1. Consider having each roommate put money in a savings account at the beginning of the semester for the bills. Then the person taking care of the bills will draw from that account.
2. Have the person taking care of the bills post when each bill is due and how much each roommate owes.