Living with roommates is, without a doubt, the best way to reduce your monthly rent costs. But if you’re not careful, it can also be a huge pain in the butt. Luckily, there are some tools out there that can help make the process a lot simpler. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the top three tools for renting with roommates. So whether you’re just starting out or have been living together for years, these tools will help make things run more smoothly. Keep reading to learn more!
Renters seem to run into common problems. Roommates can be messy, lazy, or otherwise have a different perspective of what being a good roommate means than you. Ultimately, most renters figure out their roommates’ quirks well after it’s too late and are stuck “making it work” or pretending it’s fine.
The truly lucky end up living with a unicorn roommate who does their own dishes and pays bills on time. However, there are several tools that can make life easier and less likely to result in disaster for the rest of us. Oh, and these tools work well even for friends or couples moving in together with the best intentions.
Our top 3 tools to make life with roommates easier are WellPaid, Nipto, and TimeTree.
- WellPaid – Automatically Share Bills and Login Details
WellPaid is the first all-in-one bill management tool that allows roommates or couples to track, split, and share services together. The service was designed to identify bills and subscriptions in connected card or bank accounts, then simplify sharing with roommates.
Users can tag roommates to shared bills and request to get paid back with everyone’s share automatically. Transfers are sent directly to your bank and use existing financial accounts.
WellPaid also allows users to add renewal reminders for subscriptions and a shareable password vault to keep all bill details together. While the service is still in beta, it appears the WellPaid team will be launching an app in the next few months for on-the-go support.
WellPaid is our top-ranking tool for roommates as it was the easiest to use and solved a source of roommate friction without ongoing maintenance. We love the simplicity and how easy it was to get organized. Also, the recurring bill finder portion was scary good, and I even caught a news service that was renewing I had forgotten about.
- Nipto – Split Up House Chores
Nipto wants to make sharing chores competitive and entertaining. The app is perfect if you are friends with your roommates and want to make chores a little less awful.
To start, you add roommates to the team, and then list out tasks for this week in order from most important to least. Then you assign points according so each person gets their own reward when they complete it fastest or best. Finally, the winner with the most points wins a reward furnished from the remaining roommates.
The competition between roommates adds a little interest to what would otherwise be mundane chores. Mopping will never be fun, but it might be a little more tolerable if your roommates owe you a steak dinner for getting it done right away. As an added bonus, this runner up roommate app puts some pressure onto other members too perform well.
For the diabolical in you, we recommend using this app with an added punishment for last place. Slacking is fine as long as you don’t mind being the one buying and cooking the steak dinner for the better roommate. Shame and punishment can be a hilarious twist.
- TimeTree – Shared Calendars
TimeTree is the perfect app to have if you’re living in shared accommodations with roommates operating on different schedules. This one is particularly useful for roommates on unusual working or travel schedules.
To start, you can invite your roommates to sync calendars, including an integration to Google Calendar, and easily manage group events without any hassle. If you need to pencil in when a guest or party is on the horizon, it’s much easier to keep track of events in-one-place with TimeTree.
We recommend this tool in particular for roommates that have flexible working schedules as a way to better communicate quiet hours. Having lived with a resident student that worked or was “on call” on an apparently random schedule, it was almost impossible to know when I was allowed to blast my beloved Kanye. Truly incapacitating, I assure you. TimeTree would have been a lifesaver.
These three tools should help to make the renting process with roommates significantly less stressful. Roommates can be great, but they can also present their own unique challenges when it comes to living together harmoniously. Hopefully, one of these tools, WellPaid, Nipto, and TimeTree, will work for you and your roomies!
