An Innovative Way to Divide Rent

December 3rd, 2009 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in Roommates | 2 Comments »

(photo courtesy of A Natural Sound)
It’s the first of the month and it’s time to pay rent. How do you do it? Do you pay rent with a credit card? Do you have to collect rent from your roommates, hope that their checks clear and then pay the total to the landlord in your own name?
If you are in charge of collecting the rent from roommates, the most common way to divide rent is based on the size of the room each resident. However, there are some other ways to quantify the value each resident brings to the house and apply that to the money owed each month.
See the below email correspondence for one apartment’s solution to figuring out who owes how much for a given month:
Subject: jokes aren’t cheap
From: M**
To: A****, D***, E***
can i have $418 at your earliest convenience please?
From: D***
To: M**
Holy crap it’s december!
From: E***
To: M**
maybe we should base our rent off the number of jokes not told. i mean each of us probably averages 2.5 jokes per night, that’s 10 total jokes per night.  on an average month, that’s 300 jokes per month, or $1.39 per joke ($418 / 300 jokes).   so drew, who isn’t that funny and doesn’t have many good jokes, would owe slightly more than us for all of the missed joke opportunities.  you on the other hand, would not owe very much for rent, because you are not missing out on many joke opportunities, thus reducing the dollar per joke you would owe.