If you often split the bill on anything Rent/Utilities/Drinks/etc you should check out Splitwise [0]. They have a Web/iOS/Android apps and it has been a life saver. I've used it for a little over a year now and it makes all expenses a breeze. It keeps track of who owes who what and can (when enabled) even simplify the debts so if person A owes $10 to person B and person B owes $10 to person C then Splitwise will report that person A owes person C $10.
Note: I have no affiliation with Splitwise, I just love the product.
Ideally, A's credit is discounted and B can only relieve $7 of their debt to you with the $10 A-note (or whatever you value A's debt at). They can choose to take it, or try to collect their $10. Eventually, as people's value of A's debt goes down, splitting a bill with A makes them take a larger portion of it because of their "default" risk.
In person, A thinks that's bullshit and immediately refuses to pay anything, out of principle. People stop splitting with A unless he has the cash on hand and eventually have to kick him out of the house.
Not saying the app works that way. In fact, that's probably why the app doesn't work that way.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. I will say that it would be nice if you could choose to charge interest on debts not repaid after X amount of time. I don't enjoy acting like a 0% interest bank but it's better than not getting paid at all. Before I would just forget or give up trying to "collect" but now there is a ledger and I know I will eventually get paid. The cool thing about Splitwise is it makes it really easy to buy things for the group as a way to pay off debt. For example: One of my roommates was behind on their debts and so every time they had a little money they would buy some/all of the groceries on the list and then put the bill in Splitwise. In this way 2/3rds of the cost of the bill was applied to their debt and they slowly paid it off. In my experience this is a much better way to collect as they see benefit from from it as well (food) and it feels less like just having to hand over money to the lender.
EDIT: As it turns out they have an API [0] so I guess I could write something that would auto-add "bills" for interest if I wanted to but my current setup works fine ATM and I feel like some of my friends would not be happy with being charged interest :).
Jon from Splitwise here. Yep - we don't include interest rates or try to price debt transfers, because we want to keep things casual. The "debt simplification" is an awesome feature but is not on by default because some people have differing levels of trust with different friends.
We do send monthly reminders to make sure people are good about either paying back or picking up the check next time. People often just use it to keep track of who should pay next and that is the way I primarily use Splitwise personally. With good friends, Splitwise is just a way to let our balance roll and figure out who should pay today.
With more distant or very diligent friends who don't like being in debt, they settle up right away and like the monthly reminder emails. To each his or her own!
We have our API just for things like this. I actually have personally borrowed money with interest (a large amount to pay off a credit card) from a friend, and tracked the debt, payments, and interest on Splitwise. We did repayments via PayPal and I added interest each month using my own calculations. We were both very happy and it's been paid off for a while now.
If someone wrote a general Splitwise interest-on-your-balance app (I would make it be opt-in for friends who agreed, with 0% still as the default for balances) on our API, that'd be awesome.
Thanks Jon! When I get some free time I might play with the API a little bit. I'm sure flat interest % for balance at the end of the month (or any other point in time) would be fairly simple but I would want to take it a step further. I would like it have a "grace period" of X months (or X time intervals) from money lend date before interest kicks in and even then you would only be charged interest on money that hadn't been paid in X time intervals not all you owe. Of course this would be much more difficult than a simple:
$interestBillAmount = $amountOwed*$interestRate
That ran each month. Anyways keep up the great work, I use Splitwise all the time and it's a huge time and stress saver!
You don't have to enable "Simplify Debts" also debts are only simplified within a group of friends that you control. I have a group for my roommates (which makes it easy to just apply rent/utils to a group) who I trust to pay me back. I wouldn't join a group with a deadbeat or invite one to join one I am a part of.
All those forms output through an "in-page pop up" ("pop over"?) window that dims the rest of the page. It doesn't correctly display on any of my Android browsers. Mobile vs desktop page request doesn't matter. Can only see part of the results, and can't scroll over to the close button so I have to leave the tab all together.
I see this kind of brokenness all the time. Is there a well known way to fix it on my end? Is this just bad web design?
Yea but the prices there are arbitrary. With the NYT calculator if you make "rational" choices you are guaranteed at least a fair split (better if your mate is irrational)
Jon from Splitwise here, thanks @mjmahone17 for mentioning our answer to this problem.
I think if you have complex or specific preferences about rent splitting (ie I don't want to live next to the kitchen) and live with a bunch of fellow nerds, an implicit fair division system may work well. The NYT calc is a great new implementation the Francis Su paper - the old Java one was broken.
If you have non-nerd roommates, couples living together, or are already assigned to rooms by fate or immutable preference, that's what the Splitwise calculator is for. The price are based on square-footage, survey data, and common sense. Not everyone is willing to change from the room they like, or sit for an auction.
Good point, for cases where you can't actually make a choice a curated price calculator is the best one can really hope for. In any case splitwise is a nice product btw :)
Which is kind of insane, right? The whole point of the bidding system is that it ends in an optimal position, where nobody would pay more for a room than someone else is already paying. Whereas with an arbitrary system, you might well end up in that situation.
I suppose the insight is that (some or many) people are more ready to accept an unfair situation dictated by a dispassionate external authority (even if that authority is just some JavaScript!) than a fair situation reached by negotiation.
Part of what might make this reasonable is that this process takes who is moving in together as a given. Say you and I want to be roommates, and you happen to know that I have a pathological fear of sleeping in big bedrooms. Clearly the efficient thing to happen if you're a normal person is for you to get the large room and me to get the small room. But how much do we pay?
It seems rather unfair of you to incorporate that information into the bidding system and bid up the price of the small room (a sort of strategic bidding). But it also seems unfair that if we both answer honestly the system has a good chance of making the smaller room priced the same (or more than) the big room.
With any other roommate, especially one who didn't know about my pathological fear, I could expect to pay less for the smaller room. These "external authorities" might reflect such widespread notions, as well as avoid the risk of strategic bidding that can occur after roommate selection is fixed.
Splitwise has been an argument saver for dividing up rent. When you have huge discrepancies in bedroom size and people on different budgets, the arguments get really awkward unless you're using some type of "unbiased" tool.
I don't think this has anything to do with the article/calculator. The OP is about an auction process to determine who pays what, not actually exchanging the money or tracking it.
It has to do with splitting the cost of shared resources, I will agree that it's not the same as the OP but I will argue that it is in the same vein and further more that people that are interested in how best to split rent might also be interested in a way to facilitate the collection and tracking of said rent.
Splitwise used to have a link to Venmo but I can't find it now, they do have Paypal integration that you can use (you have to pay Paypal fees though). That said you can of course use whatever you want to exchange money and my roommates use Venmo and Simple Instant (and goods/services like groceries/utilities in their name) to pay each other.
This worked for me in the past. Once we settled on rooms, we bid for the largest ones. Very efficient. Still split utilities multiple ways. The only problem is in one situation when one of the guys moved his girlfriend in without asking.
This looks awesome. I like the UI at first glance. I have been using https://www.buxfer.com/ for the past 5+ years for tracking expenses with roommates. It works really well, but the UI leaves much to be desired.
Ok, it's kind of like a (feature-wise) Mint + Splitwise?
I think I might check it out. I will probably keep using Splitwise but if it can do everything mint can do and track iou's I might try to use it as a mint replacement then write something that can mirror my Splitwise history to Buxfer and keep using Splitwise.
I have only ever used it for the feature set similar to Splitwise, so I can't comment on the Mint like features. Sounds like a good plan though. I hope it works out for you!
I'll have to check that one out. Thanks for the link!
Edit: It appears to be for iOS only according to the website [0]. This wouldn't be an issue for my current roommates but I do have some friends on android that I use splitwise with that wouldn't be able to use this. If they ever add Android support I will be sure to check it out.
Just bought this per your recommendation and I'm excited. My girlfriend and I have just been keeping a bunch of the receipts for shared expenses in an envelope -- this is way better.
I have to say, I really don't like that 'simplification' of debts. If I extend credit to B, I don't want repayment to be contingent on the creditworthiness of A instead.
Note: I have no affiliation with Splitwise, I just love the product.
[0] https://www.splitwise.com/