splitting a house - do you split by rooms, or people?

[Anonymous]

We have had this and there is no good answer.

If you do it by rooms - what happens when you get the crappy room? [We have had the small room with a crib and pack and play in it when my SIL had the large room - double our size - but kids decided to sleep with grandparents - who had master suite.]

I was furious and asked my SIL to switch with us since the kids were not sleeping in her room - and she refused since she was already unpacked. We no longer go on vacation with them.

[Anonymous]

I was the single adult in this scenario for a long time. I thought it was fair to split by # of rooms used. The only annoyance came when I got stuck on a couch - no one should I be putting in an equal amount wuth no privacy and stuck up until the last person goes to bed, and awake when the first person is up for coffee.

Food and other expenses should be per person, if doing as a group.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How would you split this? 5 bedroom, 10 person house- adults and older kids (no babies).

Group 1 (2 adults, 2 teens)
Group 2 (2 adults, 1 kid)
Group 3 (1 adult, 1 teen)
Group 4 (1 adult)

If Group 1 gets 2 bedrooms I’d do 40/20/20/20.

If I’m in a bedroom with my kid I don’t want to pay a premium for that.

Other expenses should be split per person.

A single adult should pay the same as 3 people? That doesn't seem fair. It's not a matter of paying a premium for sharing a room with your kid - it's paying for the people you bring along.

Why not? It’s not like they could get a house with fewer bedrooms to save money if that other group had only one or two people in the bedroom instead of three.

Kids still take up resources - bathroom time/space, utilities, common area space, etc.

Splitting rooms and bills makes more sense when you have nice, even percentages and if these are your friends, things should even out over the lifetime of the friendship vs being even for just this trip. I think 40/20/20/20 makes sense but the families should make larger contributions to the group food/supply pot. If the single adult is grumpy about the arrangement, then perhaps this isn’t the group to travel with.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have had this and there is no good answer.

If you do it by rooms - what happens when you get the crappy room? [We have had the small room with a crib and pack and play in it when my SIL had the large room - double our size - but kids decided to sleep with grandparents - who had master suite.]

I was furious and asked my SIL to switch with us since the kids were not sleeping in her room - and she refused since she was already unpacked. We no longer go on vacation with them.

I’m the single adult poster. None of these ideas really work if you have selfish people like your SIL in the mix. I wouldn’t vacation with her anymore either. My parents have a beach house now. When multiple siblings are there with families, we automatically take the rooms which make the most sense given who has older kids vs. cribs etc. sorry you’re SIL is so rude.

[Anonymous]

It depends on how the bedrooms and bathrooms are being divided.

A single person staying alone in a bedroom with its own private bath is going to pay the same amount as a family of 4 piled into 1 room and sharing a bath.

A single person bunking in with a teen or kid and sharing a hall bathroom with the kids is going to pay less.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How would you split this? 5 bedroom, 10 person house- adults and older kids (no babies).

Group 1 (2 adults, 2 teens)
Group 2 (2 adults, 1 kid)
Group 3 (1 adult, 1 teen)
Group 4 (1 adult)

[/quote

I'd split it six ways just based on the number of adults. Kids sleep free. If any of the adults complain I would not consider them family or friends.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Per room. If the house has 6 bedrooms, each room is $x for the week. If you want to be cheap and put 4 people in one room, that's your issue.

But most likely bedrooms are not all of same quality. I don't want to pay the same to sleep on bunkbeds as a sibling in a king with a master bath.

[Anonymous]

We are 4 families who share a beach house every year, and we use the system described above - adults pay full share and kids pay half share. the kids always get the basement and get to fight over the available beds/couches. Adults each get a bedrom with bath, with the one adult who has no kids getting to choose the bedroom farthest away from the kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How would you split this? 5 bedroom, 10 person house- adults and older kids (no babies).

Group 1 (2 adults, 2 teens)
Group 2 (2 adults, 1 kid)
Group 3 (1 adult, 1 teen)
Group 4 (1 adult)

For example, the rental cost $1000.

Adults- 1
Kids (under 18)- .5

Group 1- 3/ $375
Group 2- 2.5/ $312.5
Group 3- 1.5/ $187.5
Group 4 -1 / $125

This is the best suggestion, IMO.

[Anonymous]

Whatever makes the most sense, just keep it simple. If you're doing it by bedrooms, all bedrooms are worth the same. If you're doing it by people, all people count the same. If you're splitting groceries, everyone pays an equal share (except maybe kids seven and under count as half, but it's easier just to count everyone as whole people).

I don't do group vacations with high-maintenance people. If you're going to split hairs over the exact square footage of your bedroom closet to try to pay less for your room, I don't travel with you. If you claim you're going to cram yourself, your spouse and your teen into one bedroom to save money over two bedrooms, only to have your teen sleep on the couch in the common room so everyone else feels like they have to tiptoe around until they wake up at noon, I don't travel with you. If you're going to divide grocery bills down to the level of whether you ate the steak or the chicken the night someone grilled for everyone, I don't travel with you. If it's more stress to figure out the bills with you than the vacation was worth, I don't travel with you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How would you split this? 5 bedroom, 10 person house- adults and older kids (no babies).

Group 1 (2 adults, 2 teens)
Group 2 (2 adults, 1 kid)
Group 3 (1 adult, 1 teen)
Group 4 (1 adult)

In our family, all the adults (single or couples) would get their own rooms and the kids would bunk together in 1 room. So adult couples of Groups 1 & 2 get their own rooms, single adults of Groups 3 & 4 each get their own rooms, and the kids are in the 5th room. The kids may end up being in the biggest room if it has more beds or space.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How would you split this? 5 bedroom, 10 person house- adults and older kids (no babies).

Group 1 (2 adults, 2 teens)
Group 2 (2 adults, 1 kid)
Group 3 (1 adult, 1 teen)
Group 4 (1 adult)

In our family, all the adults (single or couples) would get their own rooms and the kids would bunk together in 1 room. So adult couples of Groups 1 & 2 get their own rooms, single adults of Groups 3 & 4 each get their own rooms, and the kids are in the 5th room. The kids may end up being in the biggest room if it has more beds or space.

Posted before I read all the responses. I see you want a cost allocation. We would split the cost by 10 (so equal cost per person, no discount for kids or couples to be fair to the single person), with the rooms allocated as above. Kids get the short end of the stick. Oh well, too bad, so sad. I'm the married mom of a lot of kids btw so in this situation we would end up paying more than half of the overall cost.

[Anonymous]

This discussion reminds me of one year when we tried to book a beach house with a group of friends but there weren't any good houses with our preferred number of bedrooms available the week everyone could go, so we needed to either go down a bedroom (and a couple of singles would share) or up a bedroom (and then figure out fair use of the extra bedroom). One couple kept changing their mind as to what was "fair" depending on whether we were talking about the bigger house or the smaller house and how the extra bedroom in the bigger house would be used, basically angling for whichever arrrangement would minimize their own share. We eventually got fed up and decided we needed to find a different week when we could get the right number of bedrooms. Wouldn't you know, the next best week happened to be the one week the difficult couple couldn't make it.

[Anonymous]

With my friends, we always split equally per adult, so those w/ kids gets off lightly... but singles actually do well b/c they get their own room at half the cost. This assumes that we look for a house where kids will share w/ parents or all kids will bunk together in one room; if we started having to book out extra rooms to accommodate particular families, then we would re-jigger the costs.

[Anonymous]

We are in a similar situation. We'll be renting a house with a total of fifteen people. Two families with a total of four small kids and then an assortment of couples and single adults. Parents will likely have to share with kids and two of the single adults will likely have to share. We're trying to figure out what makes sense. Our hitch is that the two families with small kids make more money than everybody else, so we'll probably go for paying by person to help equalize that.