How do you know if a potential home-mate is suitable?

Finding a suitable and compatible home-mate is the most important part of a successful home sharing arrangement. But how do you make the leap from just meeting someone to actually living with them? There is so much that is unknown. It feels risky.

Your imagined and desired future of comfortable shared housing disappears as soon as you start worrying about the “what-if’s?”.

• “What if I discover I made a horrible mistake?”
• “What if the person pulls a con on me and says a whole bunch of stuff in the interview that isn’t true?”
• “What if I have to compromise my personal way of living so much that I’m not comfortable?”

It’s Okay

It’s okay to feel worried about all this. It’s natural. Home is sanctuary. Home is the place where you can be yourself. As Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home.” You have your own personal routines, style and habits. You have your way of living at home.

Let the Home-Mate Compatibility Assessment Toolkit to be your road to safety.

The Benefits of Shared Housing

There are so many good reasons to share your housing. You might be thinking about the financial benefits. They can be significant.  Housing is so expensive. For those who are on small and limited incomes the extra money can be the difference between anxiety and comfort. For others, the extra money allows for treats and luxuries—from a regular massage to a dream vacation. An extra $500  a month turns into an additional $6,000 a year. That’s significant for most people.

Beyond the money, another person around the home is another person to help with tasks and in emergencies. This is help people in couples or families take for granted. But the person who lives alone has to do it all.

Companionship is the reason why people who start living in shared housing continue to do it. They discover that they like the spontaneous social connection, the easy chats possible.  It’s really comforting to have a good housemate around.

What You Can Do to Feel Safe

The first thing many people think of when they want to feel safe about a potential housemate is doing a background check. And while it’s fine to go ahead and do one, a background check will only tell you if the person has a criminal history and what their credit is like. It doesn’t tell you if you can live with the person.

You need a different way to check if the person is compatible with you.  Something like a pilot’s checklist. Every time a pilot prepares to fly a plane, the pilot goes through a checklist. Of course the pilot knows what she should be checking—she’s probably done it hundreds of times—but the checklist ensures that in the routine of the task she doesn’t skip even one item. The one that if missed might crash the plane.

Cover Your Bases with the Compatibility Assessment Checklist

The “Home-Mate Compatibility Assessment” is not as long as the pilot’s checklist. It’s much simpler. It focuses on the aspects of sharing a home that are the nitty-gritty details, details that often get overlooked when you don’t have experience in sharing housing.  It’s a tool for you to use at two different stages in your home-mate search. In the first stage it will help you assess what is really important to you in how you live. The second stage is to use your answers in the interviewing process.

My Story About Taking an Assessment

How The Assessment Works

The Home-Mate Compatibility Assessment is on-line. You answer the questions and then your results are emailed to you. At first that will not seem like a big deal—after all you know who you are, right?

The Home-Mate Compatibility Assessment offers a structure for your exploration of compatibility with a potential home-mate. It’s your guide to talking with a potential housemate about those things that might crash the relationship if you don’t have clarity and agreement about how you’d live together. This is not a natural conversation. (Flying a plane is not a natural task.) It’s a bit artificial and contrived. Slightly uncomfortable.

The Real Power — Comparing Answers

The real power of the Home-Mate Compatibility Assessment comes in comparing your answers with a potential home-mate.

With the questionnaire you have a script and a method to follow – it will help you be thorough and complete in your exploration.

• Thirteen carefully-honed questions that will help you identify what’s important to you in sharing a home.
• Your own answers delivered in email for you to print and use in screening housemates in a comfortable conversation.
• Open comments section for you to note any special interests or concerns so that you don’t forget to consider them.

If you are like other people you’ll discover that it’s fun to compare answers and that the conversation moves easily.

Annamarie’s Home-Mate Compatibility Assessment has been really helpful to me both in thinking through what’s really important to me and learning what to ask when I’m interviewing a potential house mate.

Right now I own my own home and hope to find 2 or even 3 people to live with me next summer and I feel really prepared to not only write a better ad based on some of the things that are deal breakers for me in the survey, but also how to get to the point quicker about what matters in terms of household compatibility.

The survey makes a really good jumping off point to start the process, especially if both people have completed it.  It used to be that I would just go on my gut- how we got along, what values you we might share, etc.-but I’ve learned that our household habits are what really makes the difference!  And if I ever am the one seeking a shared house, I will bring all this knowledge with me too! —Catherine Skove

How many times have you considered sharing housing but got stopped by apprehension, doubting that you could do it successfully?

How To Get Your Home-Mate Compatibility Assessment Kit