In my last post I mentioned I was participating in the Discovering Shared Housing webinar. Each session included assignments to think of what we wanted in a potential home sharing scenario. I consider myself a pretty flexible individual, but after looking back at my prior living situations–both platonic and romantic–there are a handful of “Oh, […]
Read More...Expectations for Future Home Sharing
I’m currently participating in the Discovering Shared Housing webinar, and it has me thinking of my personal home sharing expectations for the future. Flatmates circa 1995-1998 During the mid-late 1990s, as previously noted, I went the flatmate route because I couldn’t afford my large and lovely flat in San Francisco. I was fortunate to have […]
Read More...How She Left Silence and Discovered Freedom
“I didn’t like the silence,” said Janet explaining how she ended up choosing a life of shared housing. At the time, she was living alone after the divorce in the house of her twenty-five year marriage. She also retired from stressful, more-than-full-time job as a litigator. Her experience of the silence was such that she […]
Read More...We Need to Talk
Does “We need to talk” make you nervous and tense when your partner, friend or home-mate confronts you about a necessary conversation? Communication with anyone, but especially with your home-mate, shouldn’t make you nervous. In fact, you should welcome it because apart from discussing an annoyance, it also opens the door to having an honest […]
Read More...Sweet Surprise in Discovering Shared Housing
“It’s a sweet surprise to me,” says Janet about living with Kathleen as home-mates. How It Happened Kathleen and Janet were already friends. They met when Janet was Kathleen’s Episcopal priest, and Kathleen served on the vestry (a church board). Their friendship included vacationing together – Kathleen with her husband and son. After Janet had […]
Read More...When Heartbreak led to Home Sharing Heaven
I’ll spare you the details of my heartbreak, but let’s say it wasn’t pretty. I was put in a position of losing half an income, the possibility of having to finance an expensive move with a dog at a time in San Francisco when housing wasn’t particularly pet-friendly for renters, and just the prospect of […]
Read More...Is Airbnb a Good Choice for Retirement Income?
Airbnb allows a friend to earn her property taxes. Right now, as I post this, I’m at an Airbnb quite close to a family wedding which I’m sharing with my siblings at a fraction of what it would cost us to stay in a motel. We had dinner together last night and my dog is […]
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