Students sharing utility bills?

[andyoxon]

Anyone with any experience of what works/ what to avoid in paying for gas/electric/wifi/water etc?  mini-ao has asked about https://fusedbills.co.uk - presumably a website that organises it for you.  mini-ao also mentioned a joint acct that everyone pays into - though I suspect that could go horribly wrong...

[Jaded]

Daughter opened a joint account, they all paid into it, she managed the account. It worked well, but we could see the possible problems (which to my mind were surpassed by the possibility of one student leaving and the landlord going for an east target to get the rental money. Student leases are stacked heavily in favour of the landlord.

The biggest problem has been one flat mate liking to live in a sauna and being incapable of understanding either a thermostat or a timer.

[andyoxon]

Thanks Jaded.  Interesting to hear that the joint acct worked.  They've already had someone pull out of the house before even moving in, fortunately person is now back. 

[Ben T]

Not sure but do something more than just putting it in her name and trusting the rest to pay, it can harm friendships as it's too tempting for the others whose name isn't on it to view that as the least serious competition for their limited budget.

[Jaded]

Someone that doesn’t pay their share of a utility bill is not a friend.

Living together involves trust. It’s part of growing up. Sometimes things don’t pan out as expected and the youngsters learn about life.

[chrisbainbridge]

I would also suggest standing orders as well so that the money comes directly into the joint account.

[barakta]

I found various ways worked or didn't work depending on the household.

In student household 1 and 2 each person was responsible for paying a different bill
(Phone, electricity, gas, ADSL, water, etc)
When bill came in, responsible-person contacted housemates and said "Bill is £X, you all owe me £Y usually a split share). Repayment was usually cash or bank transfer and as it was little and often it worked OK. Was a good way to keep track monthlyish of household STUFF. Sometimes someone would be hard up and ask for a bit longer but I don't remember anyone refusing to pay even the arsehole-ratbag of the house.

I did landlinephone in House 1 and we had an itemised bill and a phonecall log. Each person was responsible for their friends' calls... In house 1 it mostly worked and the £few discrepancy was usually cancelled out by random discounts BT did to bits of bill.  Forrin-Housemate in year 2 tried to deny responsibility the month he ran up £150 of bill "I didn't know" which didn't work cos ALL 5 of us other housemates had warned him the kinds of calls he was making were expensive and he'd poohpoohed us. He tried to cry and guilt us out of him paying but that didn't work so he did eventually pay.

In House 2 there was often £5 each of unclaimed payments on EACH phonebill PER PERSON which given there was 7 of us was a LOT. 4 of the housemates were "Christian" which seemed to mean they let their friends abuse household resources and then tried to claim EVERYONE should cover those costs equally. For some reasons these Christians and their friends were obsessed with phoning 192 and International 192 to the tune of £50+ a month... Then cos the Christians were terrible at paying their stuff promptly, the guy (one of the Christians) paying phonebill threatened to cut it off 6 weeks before we moved out (exam season). We managed to convince him to accept upfront anticipated bills and people did pay properly in the end... but nightmare. Hopefully landline bills are No Longer A Thing.  Also one of the other Christians moved out early and refused to pay his share of bills or indeed clear his room, so not to lose deposit we had to do it, then he whined that we binned his stuff.

Student House 3 had PAYG gas and electric separately. One housemate worked but agreed to pay most or all of the council tax (can't remember) - he also paid water bills upfront. Kim paid ADSL and presumably phone too in the days when ADSL was £40-60 a month. The PAYG utilities stuff was whoever took the card/stick thing to the shop and paid. We had a computer programme (3 compscis in a house) to track the payments. At the end of the year a massive spreadsheet was made up of all the costs and minimum transactions to even it all out worked. While one person whined about quite a big bill, not realising occasional PAYG payments didn't add up to move, they did pay cos they weren't poor and knew the spreadsheet was accurate. You could do this on a shorter timescale if a whole year of bills is Too Much.

I think Student House 4 was only 3 of us and we did it like Houses 1 and 2. No one was an arsehole so it was mostly fine.

I think a lot depends on the housemates and how cooperative they are. If someone is a ratbag they'll do it whatever the method. I'd worry about ratbags and joint accounts if there was ever much cash or overdraft possibility as each holder is able to take out all quids but all are jointly and severally liable for debts etc. Also banks...  I am however old enough that online banking was available but in its infancy when I was a student. These days it may be easier.

It is worth being clear what the status of bills are if someone moves out early, or indeed if someone "moves a partner in" for substantial periods of time. Sometimes an agreement can be easily made, other times it causes conflict.  It's a balance between trust no one and try not to be too much of an arse and hope people will be reasonable.

[drossall]

I did landlinephone in House 1...

In the student house I was in, at the beginning of the 80s, we had a payphone in the hall (this was an ordinary house, with six students in the six bedrooms, one of which would normally have been the dining room, and my room had been a small bathroom at one time I gather). We had a steady stream of friends from elsewhere wanting to use the phone. And no problem with bills because we just opened the box with the key provided

Not that that is much help, I suspect.

[barakta]

Heh, yes. I'm just a little too young for payphones in student houses or halls... By the time I was a student most students had a phone in their room with some cheaper nastier halls having 1 phone in the corridor, but there was an account so you dialed your account deets and didn't have to use money...

I am old enough to remember people's housemates being shit at passing messages...

Mobile phones ftw on SO many levels!

[hellymedic]

I think we used the phonebox on the street. I can't remember having a phone in our shared house. I was mostly resident in hospitals that year though.

I can't remember what we did about bills but remember no disputes with my housemates. Maybe the landlord paid the bills and passed them on; maybe they were included in the rent. Suspect we were all sensible, boring and grown-up...

[barakta]

It was a minority of housemates who were irksome about bills and only 1 or 2 who were actively annoying. Most people understand the basic ethics of paying your share. Those who didn't, rapidly got educated... Much like the housemate of mine who refused to vacuum cos he wore inside only shoes and didn't create vacuum-worthy mess - we introduced him to what dust particles actually are   He contributed to household rota chores after that

[drossall]

I can't remember having a phone in our shared house.

Neither did most of our fellows. That's why they came round to use ours...

Now that you mention it, I think that the line was charged at domestic rates, whereas payphone rates are higher, so we could turn in a small profit by encouraging them to do so

I actually moved in, in my third year, to a house full of friends who had been there the year before as well. A previous-year finalist had moved out of my small room, creating the one vacancy. So everything was organised and set up from the year before, and I just had to fit in. I never did meet our landlady. I assume that she was a real person.

They taught me to cook for their own self-preservation (we had a rota). One of the guys had his mother visit one weekend, and I remember her teaching me to make pastry. I wouldn't have dared not do my cleaning; another lad was the most house-proud person I have ever met, and kept us all in check.

[barakta]

The "Mr I don't create dust" didn't know how to cook when he moved in with us. He had had a sheltered upbringing. He learned to cook eventually via a phase of living on brown rice and cheese.

We didn't do much shared cooking cos no one could agree on what was suitable food. Any shared meal was usually pasta mess.

[hellymedic]

My Dad was well impressed when I did baked trout for him when he visited. He never realised I was domesticated...

[drossall]

My Mum was convinced I could only do shepherd's pie and apple crumble. They are favourites of mine, but the pastry episode above obviously passed her by entirely and, once you can make that, it's not hard to experiment more.

[mrcharly-YHT]

IMO, the best houses are ones where the bills are included in the rent (that's what I look for). Anything else is difficult.

People are a bit funny about expenses. In my current shared house, I'm the only one who uses the tumble drier. The rest dry stuff on racks in the house. there are no extractor fans in the house - we leave a lot of windows open so no mould problems  . . . Still, some people grumble about electricity use of tumble drier - but they think nothing of using the oven to cook food for one person 4-5 times a week (and it is a big oven).

I have been doing a lot of looking a house shares recently because I need to move again and not using tumble drier because of worry over cost is pretty common. So is complaining over mould in houses.

Laundrettes charge 50p for 8min in a drier round here.

[Kim]

If it's just a single appliance like that, I'd bung a power meter on it and work out much it's actually using.

Barakta and I did that with a fan heater for a winter a couple of years ago.  Decided we'd spent about 50 quid on Not Being Cold over the course of ~4 months.  That seemed like a reasonable tradeoff, and we stopped worrying and learned to love the circulation in our fingers.


Obviously houses vary massively, but in our pre-1900 2-up-2-down terrace, the difference in humidity from drying clothes on racks^[1] is barely detectable (I have graphs from humidity sensors in all the rooms).  It's mostly affected by - in rough order of severity - washing-up, cooking, opening windows, bathing, showering, use of heating, and weather.  The only room with a humidity problem is the bathroom, and that can be mitigated (kept below 50%RH) by keeping the door open to the rest of the house^[2].


_{[1] Not on radiators.  In winter, it can take 2-3 days for clothes to dry.  That's not a high rate of evaporation.
[2] Interestingly, this is massively more effective than opening the exterior window.  There is no extractor fan, but the prevailing draughts go inwards, anyway.}

[ian]

As others have said, managing this sort of human interaction is part of growing up. And often a module in the Some People Will Always Be Dicks 101. I wouldn't fret, it's a lesson that everyone should learn sooner rather than later.

I was a student in the 1990s, and as it was Liverpool, no one had got around to discovering central heating. Hence those big electric bar heaters, each one requiring the output of a modest soviet-era nuclear plant. Upon turning off, the residual heat had a half life measured in milliseconds. Running a brace of those all evening turned out to be expensive so we got the landlord to provide one of those gas heaters. That used to make us sleepy. The eventual solution was to go to the pub. It was either that or get the Royal Mint to churn out enough 50ps to keep the meter turning. The two houses we stayed in had meters and, in theory, there was pot of fifty pence pieces we all contributed to with some agreed amount each week. The jar was helpfully labelled 'emergency beer fund.' Honestly, it was cheaper to go the pub and buy a couple of pints each than keep those leccy heaters running.

And yes, we had that flatmate, the one who didn't pay his bills. Any bills. He was always about to. Every now and again he'd give us some random sum of money to pay off part of his rent and utility debts. Anyway, the first year he (or rather his parents) settled everything at the end of term. The second year he got worse and ended up owing us a significant amount (for students in the 90s anyway) and we figured as it was the final year, he'd disappear and we'd never see a penny. So, while he was away one weekend (undoubtedly to persuade his long-suffering girlfriend to lend him some cash), we took everything he owned. Which turned out not to be much. So, with the help of our other housemate's slight crazy parents, we hired a van, drove to his house in Cheshire and, by telling his parents that we were helping him move into his girlfriend's for the summer, literally took not just everything he owned, but everything he'd ever owned.

Then we ransomed it back, with proper cut-out-of-newspaper notes and everything. He called the police and, I'm not joking, they came around. And laughed. Brilliant lads, brilliant. Which was great (other than for Jo, as she was definitely not a lad and it was really her idea). Eventually, we met his parents on windswept Southport bench and swapped cash for a van-load of his stuff. He didn't turn up and we, unsurprisingly, never kept in touch.

When I did my PhD and the two other very brief house shares I've been in, it's always been the equal split and everyone has been fine over it. Life is too short to worry about people using hairdryers and stuff and not everyone is a dick.

[frankly frankie]

Heh, yes. I'm just a little too young for payphones in student houses or halls...

I visited a friend (not an especially close friend) in a female hall of residence and every time the phone in the corridor rang (it rang every few minutes) the general pandemonium was just hilarious to witness.

[ian]

Heh, yes. I'm just a little too young for payphones in student houses or halls...

I visited a friend (not an especially close friend) in a female hall of residence and every time the phone in the corridor rang (it rang every few minutes) the general pandemonium was just hilarious to witness.

In a house with three boys and a girl, it was predictable. Why didn't you answer the phone! she'd demand having frantically half tumbled down the stairs in a state of sartorial disarray to get to the handset the moment it stopped ringing. It wouldn't be for us we'd reply from the sofa by the phone.

[Cunobelin]

Depends entirely on the individuals how well sharing works.


I have known households where a simple 4 way split worked well.

I have known others where things were divided so much according to "usage" that they factored in the difference between who had sugar in their tea and how much more the sugar users should pay towards the community al kitchen cost!

Heh, yes. I'm just a little too young for payphones in student houses or halls...

I visited a friend (not an especially close friend) in a female hall of residence and every time the phone in the corridor rang (it rang every few minutes) the general pandemonium was just hilarious to witness.

Slightly OT

I remember one Nurse's accommodation block where there was an "obscene call specialist"

If they ever got one of these calls, she would take it, and usually managed to make them hang up in a few seconds

[barakta]

I remember phone rows. People who didn't pass on messages. People who wrote em on shitty postits which fell off the not very clean notice board. People on either side of the call acting like dicks - one housemate had this group of friends "The Organism", 15 of them who would turn up, eat/drink everything in the house, leave a trail of destruction behind who were also rude by phone... I used to hang up on them - housemate did NOT like that but I said it was their choice as they could have some manners or keep getting hung up on.

Fortunately I had a mobile after my first term and could use SMS which was cheap on my plan. Saved me the difficulty of only being able to hear about 30% of people on a phone at best... That's not something modern students will have at all. Don't remember any dirty calls except the ones a nasty housemate would pretend to make.

I am glad the first house I was in we had a massive row over TV/VCR hire where 2 people refused to pay a tiny bit extra for a TV which could do subtitles. After reasonably reminding them I'm deaf and can't access telly without subtitles, I threw a tactical strop and let someone else argue with the idiots... In a way that row made us realise life was too short for anal retentiveness on kitty contents and it mostly worked out a balance between not paying too much and too cheap and foul. We quickly decided Safeway's brown-label tea was too disgusting to drink, keeping it only for people we didn't like The one gallon of washing up liquid for £1 was also rejected by everyone except the person whose idea it was... And we BANNED her (CheapSkate In Chief) from using it on the kitchen floor cos it turned it into a fucking icerink which was a safety issue... Silly cos 2l of Flash a like was about £1 as well!