Month: December 2011

Homeowners: Have A Spare Bedroom?

There are many reasons that a family or individual would choose not rent out spare bedrooms in their house. A homeowner might have a desire for more privacy, a fear of having bad tenants, or a need to keep a guest room free (perhaps because they have adult children who use them periodically).

But for many homeowners and empty-nest-ers, the primary reason there are spare bedrooms in their house is because they didn’t go to trouble of looking for renters.

The Ann Arbor Home Share program is looking to change that. It hooks up University of Michigan renters with local homeowners interested in finding tenants. This is a fantastic idea, because students and young professionals often face a scarcity of good housing resources, and homeowners can improve their retirement finances or keep their large houses with the help of the additional income. So many more cities could use this kind of forward-thinking leadership.

We have heard from people using Splitwise that our site is great for this managing and organizing this sort of arrangement. One user wrote to us recently:

“I have been using your system for about a month and love it! I am leasing rooms in the house I own…”

Non-traditional as it may be, we’re so happy to see Splitwise helps makes it easier for people to share space and live in rental harmony together.

Welcome, Marshall

Splitwise is very excited to welcome Marshall Weir to our team in Cambridge, MA. Marshall is a mobile development ninja and server/UX dude, with previous experience building and engineering beautiful things at Mobiata. We met him through some singing friends and he’s not a bad singer himself.

Marshall is sitting next to me, right now, programming a first pass at a rewrite of our the mobile user interface. Our mobile apps could definitely use some more attention since launch, so he couldn’t have joined at a better time. But more importantly to us, Marshall is a UX-thinker, back-end hacker, bill-sharing enthusiast, and lover of good mobile products who is fun to hang out with.

It’s hard to overstate our enthusiasm for having Marshall on board. For instance, Ryan is very happy to have a teammate who understands how to write a proper SQL query. And Jon is excited to have another person he can ask about how to write a proper SQL query.

With luck, it will be only a few months (or perhaps weeks) before the delicious aroma of our fresh-baked mobile apps reaches your nostrils and/or thumbs.

How To Split A Shared Vacation House

“Should we split the check?” This dinner table cliché is just one part of an age-old sharing conundrum: should group costs be divided evenly among all parties, or allocated based on actual usage?

On holiday vacations with friends or other families, we are frequently confronted with these anxiety-inducing decisions. Items like lodging and transportation are often paid in advance, and a single person will often purchase groceries or supplies for the whole group. To add to the confusion, people will occasionally lend each other money (“Don’t worry, I’ll cover you and you can pay me back”).

It’s never pleasant to deal with these questions after the fact, so allow me to present some original research and a helpful tool that should take the stress out of settling the bills.  While some cost-sharing choices remain a matter of personal taste, there is broad consensus on how to share the most significant vacation expenses.
Continue reading How To Split A Shared Vacation House

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Announcing The Travel Calculator

Over the past few months, we’ve done a lot of research into how to share vacation expenses, thanks to the help of users like you. We posted a detailed survey to recruit respondents from the Splitwise interface. That data enabled us to create a travel calculator that tells you how much each person should pay for an expense based on how many days each person was on the trip. Go check it out! This is all part of our grand strategy to make Splitwise the best travel sharing app on the web.

I also have a new blog post on Forbes describing our data analysis. Read my post there for lots of juicy graphics, conclusions, and economic logic.

A Round-up On Roommates

With the financial crisis still fresh on our minds and wallets, sharing costs and being thrifty has become increasingly important for many people around the world. Several US newspapers wrote stories this week about how having roommates is often part the solution to dealing with a tough economy.

Splitwise is on the record with a colorful quote in the Forbes story: Continue reading A Round-up On Roommates