The best apps to solve share house money woes
by larissagardner
It’s a fact: Living with housemates can be stressful, even at the best of times.
Waiting for your turn in the shower, people pinching your food or the pile of dirty dishes always cluttering up the kitchen sink are just the tip of the share house nightmares iceberg.
On top of these common pain points, shared living often comes with awkward conversations surrounding the splitting of shared expenses.
Ongoing share house money woes can easily compound in passive aggressive texts, heated outbursts and even breakdowns of friendships in the extreme.
Just because you live in a shared environment doesn’t mean you should be put in a vulnerable situation financially or be out of pocket for the living costs of certain freeloaders.
If you find it difficult to bring up outstanding utility bills, bond payments, rent, household expenses or even the Uber Eats bill from last weekend, don’t stress — there are apps for that!
Here are three apps you need to download today to reach share house financial harmony in no time.
Easyshare
Do you frequently have problems with certain unreliable housemates missing the due date for their share of the rent? Easyshare might be able to help with that.
Easyshare removes the need for those uncomfortable money chats we all hate by keeping everyone in the household in the loop and honest. It sends reminders and notifications showing the amount still owed, who’s paid and who hasn’t. The app then collects everyone’s share of the rent or bill and pays the total for you.
So, you can kiss those nagging text messages and heated emails goodbye, this app can function as your ‘debt collector’ and do the chasing for you!
The ‘IOU’ function is also extremely useful for tracking small expenses owed by housemates (such as cleaning supplies, gardening gear or beer) and making sure they get paid.
How it works
Sign up, invite your housemates, add your rent payment details and each housemates’ share, and select how you want to pay, via bank transfer or credit card (note: payments by credit card incur a surcharge). That’s it, you can just set and forget.
Finch
Finch is an app that allows you to set up a ‘share house tab’ so you can keep track of all your combined household expenses, request payments and pay housemates.
Each housemate can add the electricity bill, the cost of Netflix, a shared pizza dinner or toilet paper for example to the tab and the app automatically calculates the difference owed by each person for when you’re ready to square up, rather than sifting through a bunch of small payments continually.
It also allows you to easily split bills equally or individually so each person pays their portion of the dinner bill or rent on time.
Better still, if you’re personally having trouble with overspending you can opt to receive insights from the app, that tracks how much you spend and where and when, to improve your spending and saving habits. Hello house deposit!
How it works
All you need is your housemates’ phone numbers (and they have to set the app up too) to send them a notification to pay you back and vice versa.
Splitr
This is a great app for keeping track of and splitting the costs of bills and shared expenses in a share house, or any group setting really!
The great thing about Splitr is you can sign up with your bank account so you don’t have to leave the app to make or receive payments and you can collect money without giving out your bank details.
It also does the dirty work for you and sends reminders for any outstanding payments and keeps track of who has paid you back and who hasn’t.
How it works
Simply take a photo of your bill or receipt, select the housemates you want to split the payment between (from your phone contacts or Facebook friends), allocate the amount split between each person, send a payment request and receive payments through your linked bank account or credit card via the app (note: credit and debit card payments are subject to a small fee).
We hope these apps allow you and your housemates to avoid conflict in the future and puts an end to your share house money troubles once and for all.
Author bio:
Larissa Gardner is the marketing manager at arguably Australia’s best looking real estate website homely.com.au. With a superb devotion to product innovation, user-centred design and innovative marketing platforms for real estate agents, homely.com.au helps millions of Australians find their next home easier and faster than ever before.
