Now live on Splitwise (and within your Splitwise iPhone or Android app) is a big update to our favorite little Splitwise feature: Quick-Add. This feature makes it really easy to add in new shared expenses, payments, loans, and IOUs!
Top This Roommate Story
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.
Happy MLK Day From Splitwise
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:
- MLK’s Wikipedia article. While Martin Luther King is best remembered for his achievements in Civil Rights, he was also an advocate for economic justice and fairness for the poor.
- Google Doodle for MLK day. This link also has a flashback to Google’s earlier tributes.
- CNN’s coverage including some Obama quotes and added context.
When You Want To Evict A Subletter
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
Juries: The Original Fairness Calculator
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
Giving Helpful Feedback To Awesome Developers
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
Retiring At 30 Through Splitting Costs
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.
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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