Confused by the bills you need to track in your shared home? Tired of using an spreadsheet and working out the formulas? Housemate’s Companion by Slamdunk Software comes to your rescue. It’s brand new and looks exactly like the basic tool that everyone needs. It not only offers easy management of the bills, it sends [...]
Posts Tagged ‘home-sharing’
First World Homeshare Congress
“The time has come!” declared Malcolm Johnson, Chairman of Homeshare International, in his welcome and introductions to delegates at the First International HomeShare Congress. In a world with a growing elderly population living alone, and with housing prices trending higher, it simply makes sense to match older householders with younger renters who can offer help [...]
Private space vs. Common space
For four years I had a housemate who was an incredible slob in his room. There was stuff all over the floor with barely a path to his bedroom. Did I ever say anything to him about that? No! That was his room to do with as he pleased. He was perfectly neat in the [...]
Lifestyle Types
Housemate Heaven is a website that presents 16 “lifestyle types”. The reader is asked to pick the type that best describes themselves. The 16 types are based on four basic categories: how personal property is shared, cleanliness of the house, the level of sociability between housemates and the attitude towards guests. It’s an attempt to [...]
Avoiding nightmare housemates
I’ve just read an article on Helium about nightmare housemates. It’s enough to make one think that sharing housing is a bad idea. It isn’t. There are plenty of wonderful people out there who are great housemates.
What makes a housemate a nightmare? Self-centeredness. Plain and simple. The nightmare housemate breaks agreements and/or refuses to modify [...]
Interviewing – The “Must Haves” Simplify Things
Your goal in the initial phone call is to determine if there is enough of a match to spend time showing and looking at the space.
You should have a clear idea of what you MUST have in a housemate and living situation. What you must have is very different from what you would like to [...]
Money – What to Charge?
One of the first hurdles in deciding to share the home you live in is figuring out what to charge your future housemates.
Renting
When you are all renting the space, this is somewhat easy as generally people simply divide the rent by the number of persons. Occasionally a room will be significantly better or worse than [...]
Housemate moves on, who’s responsible for filling the vacancy?
The housemate is definitely leaving and you are going to have an empty room in your house. You had a sense that this was going to happen. Your housemate is moving on to a new part of life. She/he is moving in with his boyfriend or girlfriend, has taken a job in a different city, [...]
Writing the ad
The ad you write needs to have six types of information:
Location
Features of the room and house
Something about who you are
What you are looking for
The financial informaton
Contact information
The location is in the subject line or headline of a paper ad. The headline should also describe the basics. It is a house, apartment, and how many people [...]
Suburban Living: Sharing A House and, Often, the Fun
There is a longish article in the NY Times about people sharing housing in the suburbs of NY. See it’s happening everywhere!