Reply to Beach house experiences--tips and 'best practices'

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lots of good tips here.

We always have a receipt jar/bowl in the kitchen, and people place their receipts (for shared expenses like food and drinks for the house) there throughout the week.  They write their name on the receipt.  At the end of the week, someone is responsible for taking the receipts home and adding them to other shared expenses (beach umbrella rentals etc.) and calculating who oews what (and to whom).  We usually work it out so that each family pays an equal share, but we've also done more sophisticated calculations to account for families with more kids or more drinkers. etc.[/quote]

This sounds petty and exhausting. I can see maybe if one family paid twice as much as everyone else, but Uncle Jim owes Aunt Karen $5 for ice cream...OK.[/quote]

I'm the PP you are quoting, and I wouldn't call it petty at all.  Some of the receipts are for $400 grocery runs, and $300 rentals (umbrellas, paddle boards, kayaks).  That's real money. Since we are already collecting them, it's no extra effort to throw in the random $20 receipts from the grocery store.  By doing it this way, we don't have to worry about keeping track about who is paying for what while we are at the beach; we sort it all out later.  And yes, one family (a different one from year to year) always seems to end up being owed significant money from the other families.  It usually depends on who does the initial grocery run at the beginning of the week. If a family takes their kids out for ice cream they don't submit a receipt becuase it's not a communal expense.  It's pretty straightforward.

How else would you keep track of who is paying for the big ticket items?[/quote]

The main tactic for everyone to throw their receipts into a bin and split sounds fine.  The piece about accounting for families with more kids or drinkers can get complicated, although we've done it for groups as long as people remain reasonable about it.  Are you gonna have one person that says they don't want to pay for the meat because they don't eat meat, or someone that says they want to pay for the meat, but not the fish because they don't eat fish, but husband does. . . it really depends on the reasonableness of the group. [/quote]

I'm the PP you are quoting, and I agree with you.  DH is a data/analytics guy, so he does the calculations and always (unprompted) offers up a few alternative split scenarios (number of people in the family, number of adults only etc.) for the group.  We always end up with the simple family split, though.  We go with the same families every year, and we are all easy going about the expenses.[/quote]

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