The Splitwise Blog

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)

On February 2nd, the US Supreme Court decided that the Fair Housing Act does not apply to roommate searches. The upshot of this decision is that people are free to conduct roommate searches based on sex, religion, marital or family status. That is, you can “discriminate” as much as you please in picking your roommates (but not if you are a landlord renting to tenants).

A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post praised this decision. It’s worth taking the author, Riger Oliveri, seriously – she is an associate Dean at University of Missouri Law School who has studied discrimination in Craigslist posts, and she practiced Civil Rights law at the Justice Department.

While broadly expressing support for the Supreme Court’s arguments, Oliveri adds that preserving choice in roommates will keep government regulation out of the home for non-traditional living arrangements as well. For instance, unmarried couples living together won’t have to fear government regulation according to the logic of this opinion (the case was against Roommates.com).

I take a slightly more nuanced view of the opinion. I share Oliveri’s enthusiasm for keeping regulation out of the privacy of the home. Picking roommates based on religion, gender, and family status makes sense – these create understandable and important practical issues inside a residence. For instance, the Fair Housing Act was clearly not intended to force people to live with people of the opposite gender against their will. What I am concerned about is that racially based roommate discrimination was not addressed by the opinion.

In tight housing markets like Boston or New York, one of the only affordable ways to rent is to find roommates with spare bedrooms. If there are no protections for searchers, I worry that racist roommate postings could keep a minority group out of a neighborhood entirely. This is exactly what the Fair Housing Act was designed to prevent.

Fortunately, Oliveri’s own study shows that this isn’t a very large issue at present. In her work, she finds only 9.7% of the posts seeking roommates on Craigslist would have violated the Fair Housing Act. Since most roommate posts only discriminated based family status, there is little evidence that roommate racism is a pervasive problem. Hopefully, this Supreme Court decision will not change people’s behavior in the future.

To summarize: I don’t object to the Supreme Court’s decision because choosing roommates based on gender, religion, and family status is clearly legitimate. I agree with Oliveri that the Fair Housing Act is too broad and would create too much regulation inside the home if it applied to roommate choice. My hope is that common decency will keep racist roommate ads to an insignificant fraction. If that proves too optimistic a hope, then we may yet see another law or another Supreme Court case.

Are you waiting with bated breath for Ryan to program a new feature on Splitwise’s main web app? Well, let me introduce a whole new way to stalk him.

Ryan has done hourly comics for the last 3 years, “in homage to John Campbell’s brilliant hourly comic.” As part of this multi-year project, our beloved, highly talented, semi-insane co-founder posts one comic per waking hour from his custom-built iPad app. March is his month of comics this year, so you can creepily track his productivity hour-by-hour at pinchpad.com. Several of them have already been about Splitwise development, of course. Continue reading Ryan’s Hourly Comics