5 months ago, we released our initial mobile apps for iPhone and Android. We’ve had great success with the apps and it’s long past time we updated them! I joined the team a month ago and started working on a new app for the iPhone – which is now waiting on approval from Apple and should be available some time next week.
While the Splitwise furniture calculator can help you deal with buying shared furniture (and who gets to keep it when you move out), the hassle of shopping for and hauling furniture is definitely one of the worst parts of moving. An article in SF Gate last week mentions an interesting new service called CORT which will help you rent all the furniture in your apartment all at once. Continue reading Rent your furniture instead of buying?
Never in my life have I read a more twisted and weird roommate story. If you have 10 minutes to kill and want to feel better about your roommates, read this lengthy, hilarious, well-written NYC horror story.
Today is a celebration of America’s greatest champion for fairness, who would have turned 83 this year. Even if you are working today (as we are here at Splitwise) and not taking the day off, there’s always time to read and reflect on what the day stands for:
Your roommate leaves for the summer and sublets their room to a friend, but the sub-letter simply isn’t paying rent. Can you evict them? Continue reading When You Want To Evict A Subletter
I had the fascinating experience of attending my first jury summons yesterday in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved when they dismissed me from the courthouse after 7 hours of waiting for my voir dire.
A randomly selected jury pool jury is in some ways the original, single-use fairness calculator. When confronted with a dispute, one presents the case to a representative sample of your peers. They vote for the result they think matches their common sense notions of what is relevant and who is right. If Splitwise didn’t do surveys to test our fairness calculators, it would be a bit like the government having a trial without a jury (maybe a stretch, but I think it’s a stimulating thought).
Continue reading Juries: The Original Fairness Calculator
How do you give useful feedback to a coworker who is solving a technical problem outside of your area of expertise? This issue surfaces in all kinds of highly skilled work, from design to engineering to finance to basic science. It’s also highly relevant for technical and non-technical founders of a software start-up. Continue reading Giving Helpful Feedback To Awesome Developers
An interesting writer named Mr Money Mustache wrote this week on MSN money explaining how he was able to retire at age 30 with all the money he saved on rent by sharing with his friends and future wife.
While he had a rather above-average salary in a location with relatively cheap housing expenses, I was impressed by his vision of home-sharing as a path to financial and career freedom. Though personally, I don’t think my fiancee and I could keep my spending that low with those incomes, sharing a bedroom or not! You can read the inglorious details of his year-by-year savings in the original article.
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.
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