The best tips to help you enjoy student house sharing will cover not just sharing the bills but also how to live an easy life with your housemates.
While this is a great opportunity to make friends for life, the problems that can occur when sharing a home will create a minefield that needs to be negotiated.
So, you may have spent time finding a lovely student house to share, and found friends to share it with you, but you will need to deal with a range of different personalities.
Someone who may be great fun in lectures will not be if they prefer to stay in their room out of sight all day long; you may have someone who’s never washed up and has no intention of doing so while others prefer to stay up late and have long lie-ins.
People can also have irritating habits and, worst of all, they may find some of your habits irritating too! Sometimes it’s easier to let these habits slide.
To help you get by, here is some advice from Glide on how best to enjoy a house share.
Live a tidy life
Everyone needs to keep the property clean and tidy and not rely on just one person to do their work. Remember, a small mess can lead to a big mess and by being tidy will help with house relations.
The Boyfriend/Girlfriend
A sure way to upset housemates is to unofficially move a boyfriend or girlfriend into the property and have them live there rent free. This will create anger so you’ll need to have some rules in place over how long a guest can stay in the property, perhaps two or three nights a week.
It’s important to appreciate that the housemates haven’t agreed to live with the boyfriend or girlfriend and it upsets the balance of those who have agreed to live together.
Pay your gas and electricity bills
Sharing utility bills, that’s the gas and electricity bills, is an important part of sharing a student property but it’s also a potential cause for falling out. Not paying bills can lead to serious consequences, for instance the gas or electric may be cut off, and you shouldn’t be reliant on other housemates to pay your share.
There also needs to be an agreement on the temperature for the property since overheating your home in winter will lead to hefty gas bills as result – this is a consequence that not every student will appreciate if their parent’s home is kept warm in cold winter months.
An easy way to deal with paying gas and electricity bills is to speak with Glide who can help split the bills between tenants and ensure everyone pays their share every month while not being responsible for those who do not pay.
Student broadband
Another important aspect to house sharing is to enjoy student broadband deals that enable everyone living there to get onto the Internet and to download what they need to without someone hogging the bandwidth. Not getting a good broadband deal will create issues.
Again, it is possible to have student broadband deals added to the utility offering from Glide so you’ll have a quality provider, probably without a capped data allowance, so you can access the Internet whenever you like.
The housemates
As hinted at earlier, choosing the right student property means having to choose the right students to share it with. This means that the funny person you recruit may not be quite so hilarious when all of their friends are at your home at 3am having an impromptu party.
You also need to be reassured that everyone understands how much the bills are going to be and budget accordingly – using Glide will help overcome this because the bills will be shared between everyone living there and Glide will collect money from each housemate to pay their share.
Get the best combination of housemates
There’s no set rule over the split between genders or personality types but it does help that you all get on well before moving in together. Also, if you’ve signed a tenancy agreement, it is not that simple for one of the housemates to move out after an argument because the rent will still need to be paid.
One of the issues over sharing a student house or flat is that it’s a learning experience so what you learn in your second year at university, will prepare you well for your third year when looking for people to share with. You may have struck lucky and remain friends with your second year housemates and move into another property or stay where you are.
Consideration
The most important aspect for those moving into a student house share is consideration so they need to take into account other people’s habits, for example, as a night or morning person, do they do any washing up and cleaning or do they enjoy playing loud music?
Essentially, when it comes to enjoying student house sharing there’s a lot to consider from selecting the right property and the best people to live with but ensuring that you can afford to live there.
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