Month: April 2012

Since we launched Splitwise, we have mostly focused on our core app: an expense-sharing platform for roommates and friends. What motivates us is the goal of improving relationships between friends. We make it easy for friends and family to organize shared bills, agree on what is fair, and be transparent with each other.

We realized one morning over coffee that the federal income tax system could use the Splitwise treatment. What do citizens think is a fair tax plan? How can we improve the quality of political debate and make taxes easier to talk about and vote on? We realized in our conversation that despite our passionate opinions on tax reform, we could not even remember what the tax rates actually are or where the brackets fall.

Enter the Splitwise Tax Fairness Project – a fun and educational way to visually modify and vote on tax proposals. Our in-house tax estimator, derived from IRS, Census, and NBER data, estimates the expected revenues from your tax plan. We are doing this as a non-partisan tax education project, and we plan to open-source our code so others can help us improve our tax model.

The idea of the Tax Fairness Project is to let Americans decide what is a prudent and fair tax code by letting anyone submit their own proposal. Visitors can play with the current tax code, see popular proposals and their impact on the budget, and vote on their favorite tax code through Facebook or Twitter. Splitwise will send the three most popular proposals to every member of Congress.

As President Obama and Governor Romney further outline their tax proposals, we will visualize them alongside top-voted user proposals.

Let us know what you think by commenting below, or email us at taxes@splitwise.com!

I was completely charmed the zany elegance of Austin’s Pink Palace, as described to me by Steven Kurutz in the New York Times. If you have a few minutes, go read that article – it made me smile.

Communal houses have a tendency to take on a wonderful life of their own, and it’s these crazy bonds and the joys of casual sharing that inspired us to start Splitwise in the first place. When Ryan joined Splitwise, he was keeping track of the group bills and IOUs for the “oothouse” at 16 Edgewood with a spreadsheet. Continue reading The Pink Palace, And Other Epic Shared Houses

Have you ever wanted to use Splitwise to split a dinner bill, or a drink that you bought for someone outside your apartment? In Splitwise 2.0, you can! The preview version (version 1.9) is live in the iPhone App Store today (Android version coming as soon as possible).

Up till now, we’ve been very focused on housemates and roommates, but we’ve always felt that Splitwise was a bigger concept than just that. Want to figure out whose turn it is to buy lunch? Just take a glance at your list of friendships. Continue reading Sneak Peek of Splitwise 2.0

Landlords, beware: you may get in more trouble than your tenants if they are caught doing something illegal on your premises. The Missoulian reports that Jonathan Janetski was arrested and charged along his tenants, who were growing medical marijuana on the premises. Allegedly, Jonathan believed that what his tenants was doing was legal, because using medical marijuana is legal under Montana state law. But the Feds busted him anyhow, since growing it is still a federal crime. According to the Missoulian, this is one of the few instances in recent history where no warning was given before a raid on a medical marijuana grower.

To add insult to injury, the crime of “maintaining a drug-involved premises” is a felony, and it’s possible he may get as harsh a penalty as his tenants. He and his tenants have made plea agreements, and the sentencing guidelines imply that Jonathan may receive 30-36 months of jail time (with a maximum of 20 years).  This hardly seems fair, but it certainly serves as a cautionary tale about how complicated things can get between tenants and their landlords. Personally, it makes me just a touch more sympathetic (as a renter) to why landlords get so stressed about who rents from them.

(via fellow Betaspring family member Inhabi)