Any input, even on only one point that jumps out at you, would be appreciated.
I rent a 3 bedroom house but only use 1 bedroom. I'm thinking about sharing the property with another tenant. So I began thinking of ways to divide the rent fairly.
e.g. If only one person moved in obviously the rent gets halved 50/50. Then I thought what if they want 2 of the bedrooms to themselves. Ok, so divide the rent by 3 total bedrooms, then multiply by their 2 bedrooms to get their share of the total rent.
Then I thought of the many possible combinations. i.e. If a family of 5 moved in it's not fair I pay according to the number of bedrooms (one-third), because there's only 1 of me and 5 of them.
So I began a spreadsheet to try to easily and consistently calculate rent shares using ratios.
e.g. $800/w total rent to pay, divided by the total number of people living in the house, multiplied by the number of people in their family = their share of the rent.
But next I thought is it fair to count a baby as an adult. So I set adults as "1" full rent share, and children as a "0.5" share.
I haven't got as far as water & electricity bills yet. But was thinking I might use the same formula/ratios to split utilities too!? It's almost certain they'll use more electricity than I do, so no matter how many move in I'd lose out there, but oh well.
So I'm seeking input, what people think:
a) Should I count children as adults, where every person no matter their age "pays" an equal share of rent? Somehow it doesn't seem fair to me a 0-4 year old should count as an adult share, but then again, they'll have 2 rooms to themselves now compared to my 1 room, so I'm not sure!? I'm open to opinions/discussion on fair ways to go about this.
b) If I should not count children as adults, at what age should they be counted as adults?
c) And what rent ratio should a child count as… a third of an adult share, a half?
d) Or should there be a few different age ranges? e.g. Age 0-4 "pays" 0% or something small like 5%, ages 5-9 "pay" xx%, 10-15 are yy%, etc. And if yes, what age ranges do people think should I set, and what should their percentages be?
e) Or is there another method entirely of splitting rent I should look at?
Obviously all this will be up for negotiation with any new tenant, but I want to have some reasonable starting point.
f) I'm concerned another person will run a wasteful fan heater day and night in their room driving the power bill through the roof, and the house really needs a reverse cycle aircon to make the worst of summer and winter tolerable anyway. So I plan to ask the Real Estate for permission to install a split system. The house is small so it would heat/cool the entire place "wasting" less power than several fan heaters running.
I thought of asking potential tenants if they will split that cost. It's almost certain they'll use more power than me. So them paying for half the aircon would mitigate some of that ongoing loss. Whoever leaves the house first would lose their half of that aircon. But the person who stays also has to wear the cost of repairing the inner and outer walls (if they want to take it with them).
So what do people think regarding that… if it were you, would you object to going halves in a new aircon?
As above, discussion and opinions welcome.
Rent the rooms by the hour…