When you move into your student house, you definitely need a bill splitter service, which is why Glide was set up, to help students like you avoid the stress, faff and awkwardness of organising the utility bills yourself, so you can enjoy your best life! We promise to do the hard work for you so utility bills are the easiest part of running your new house.
Why it’s a good idea to share the bills?
- Setting up utilities is time consuming and we want you to be able to enjoy your first few weeks of term. Using Glide will save you from ringing round each of the utility companies you need and filling out endless forms to set up an account.
- Other tenants may be late with or miss payments and utility companies won’t wait forever to receive their monthly payment – even when you’ve explained that your housemate has gone awol and won’t answer their phone. Friendships and credit ratings can be damaged when a share of the bills consistently needs chasing.
- Budgeting will be easy. One payment. Once a month. Automatically paid by direct debit. Simple. This saves someone from having to collect monies owed, pay it into an account and then each bill online or over the phone each month.
Setting up utilities yourself with various suppliers can be a real headache, especially when you have no idea what you’re looking for. One thing is also for sure, you probably want to avoid being the housemate that has their name on the bills, that can be the start of a very rocky road.
What are the options other than using a bill splitting service?
Set up a joint bank account
This is a good idea but needs a bit of thought. Open an account with the name of each tenant on it. Each of you pay the same agreed amount in and then the bills for utility services come out once a month.
However, there is a huge amount of trust involved here and if you are moving in with people you hardly know the risk may make you feel a little queasy.
If one of your housemates decides not to pay their share in one month that they are feeling particularly skint that will cause trouble. Potentially someone could drain the account and disappear. This is obviously a worse case scenario but remember that setting up an account like this places your money and credit rating in the hands of several other people.
We think that setting a joint account should only be considered with significant others or people that you have known and trusted for a long time. It usually also means that someone will have to be responsible for the paying of cash into the account – and reminding those who don’t do so. Unfortunately, this is likely to be the person who will also ensure that the bills are paid on time.
One bill for each person
This is something that we see a lot of students doing. Each tenant takes on the responsibility for organising one bill. For this to work boundaries must be set early on and tenants must agree to be accountable. Utility services will be harder to work out an amount for each month as electricity bills can change throughout the year.
A good idea is if there is good communication within the house, everyone budgets well, everyone is ready to pay up on time. Should a tenant be late all the time the person in charge of that bill may find themselves having to find the money themselves and be owed it or risk everyone else in the house getting bad credit. Again, this also risks damaging the relationships in the house because whoever is stumping up to cover the shortfall will feel like they are being used – and more so if the housemate is late paying them or doesn’t pay at all.
Another alternative is for everyone to put their name on the bill so each person is legally responsible for paying it. While this may sound like an attractive proposition, the downside is that for the housemate who doesn’t pay will then jeopardise the credit rating of everyone named on the bill. That’s not a nice situation to contemplate.
There’s no doubt that using a bill splitter service has lots of benefits and with Glide the service offers more than the alternatives. Make sure you contact us well before you move into your new student home so that we can have your new pad ready to be a cosy home, party house or place to study in peace.