<story><title>Divide Your Rent Fairly</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/science/rent-division-calculator.html?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bendauphinee</author><text>Myself and my g&amp;#x2F;f moved into a house with 2 friends. We figured a fair way to divide the rent and expenses.&lt;p&gt;We measured out the sqft of the bedrooms, and used the percentages of each room from the total bedroom sqft to split the rent and any fixed expenses like internet and lawn care (since those costs don&amp;#x27;t change based on per person usage). We applied the same to cleaning supplies and things like light bulbs in common spaces.&lt;p&gt;(Chosen Bedroom SQFT &amp;#x2F; Total Bedroom SQFT = Chosen Bedroom Expense %)&lt;p&gt;For power, since that can vary month to month based on usage, we split it by the number of people in the house.&lt;p&gt;This month, one of the friends is moving out and we&amp;#x27;re taking her room over as an office, so the power split changes to 3 way instead of 4 way, but the other friend won&amp;#x27;t see a change in her other expenses because her percentage of the bedrooms floor space is still the same.&lt;p&gt;Easy on math and easy to manage.&lt;p&gt;All expenses are tracked in a Google Doc shared to all of us, and at the end of each month I run the numbers to calculate who pays what to who to balance it out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tel</author><text>That approach is directly suggested in the accompanying article. The suggested problem is that square footage may not be sufficient to express the actual value preference difference between rooms. For instance, as the article suggests, what is the value of having a window?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s, thus, exactly the neat part of this algorithm. So long as the participants are honest then it converges on an &amp;quot;envy-free&amp;quot; set of room selections and prices. In other words, by using only your own preference for room-X-at-price-Y it builds a set of compatible room-X-at-price-Y choices provided to each participant such that they&amp;#x27;ve shown they would not want to trade with anyone else for their room-X-at-price-Y option.&lt;p&gt;The beauty of this is that the entire interface is done through these room-X-at-price-Y preferences and options so it abstracts over technical details like the relative value of a window. It&amp;#x27;s simply up to the participants to decide what they value.</text></comment>
<story><title>Divide Your Rent Fairly</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/science/rent-division-calculator.html?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bendauphinee</author><text>Myself and my g&amp;#x2F;f moved into a house with 2 friends. We figured a fair way to divide the rent and expenses.&lt;p&gt;We measured out the sqft of the bedrooms, and used the percentages of each room from the total bedroom sqft to split the rent and any fixed expenses like internet and lawn care (since those costs don&amp;#x27;t change based on per person usage). We applied the same to cleaning supplies and things like light bulbs in common spaces.&lt;p&gt;(Chosen Bedroom SQFT &amp;#x2F; Total Bedroom SQFT = Chosen Bedroom Expense %)&lt;p&gt;For power, since that can vary month to month based on usage, we split it by the number of people in the house.&lt;p&gt;This month, one of the friends is moving out and we&amp;#x27;re taking her room over as an office, so the power split changes to 3 way instead of 4 way, but the other friend won&amp;#x27;t see a change in her other expenses because her percentage of the bedrooms floor space is still the same.&lt;p&gt;Easy on math and easy to manage.&lt;p&gt;All expenses are tracked in a Google Doc shared to all of us, and at the end of each month I run the numbers to calculate who pays what to who to balance it out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dntrkv</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a good start but it doesn&amp;#x27;t account for bedrooms that are better. For example, one bedroom may have a huge bay window with a nice view and the other has a tiny alley alley facing window. How do you count that into the cost?</text></comment>