I live at my mom’s house. I know, pretty lame. But I can’t afford to live on my own in SJSU’s dorms, nor do I want to pay $600 a month for a 12×12 cell with no heat. However, I do spend quite a bit of time at Berkeley with my girlfriend (she’s a lot smarter than I), who does have roommates. I just got her on WePay because: one, I’m a shameless promoter of WePay; and two, because I know how much it will help her split expenses with her roommates.

They split utilities, rent, and other household expenses. On the last Saturday of every month, they sit down and work through all their receipts with a calculator and split the cost evenly. It’s not a pretty sight.  They have 4 main issues:

1. The landlord accepts one check from everybody (as opposed to collecting each person’s share individually). That means that one roommate has to write a check to the landlord from his or her personal bank account, and then go hound each roommate to pay him back for his or her share.
2. Each roommate pays for shared expenses with personal money. At the end of the month, they have to add up all those expenses and collect money from each other. It’s hard to keep track of, and it usually ends with a fridge full of passive aggressive post-its (“please pay me the $x you owe me for y”)
3. There are a ton of debates about who has paid whom and for how much. Record keeping is a pain, and there’s really no way to keep track of it unless you manually maintain impeccable records, or go through your bank statements fairly regularly and granularly (unless of course, you exchange cash, in which bank statements won’t do you any good).
4. Nobody ever pays anything on time, including both rent and other shared expenses.

WePay solves every one of these problems. Specifically:

1. WePay allows you to send bills to your roommates for rent, and collect money online. It automatically reminds them to pay if they are late.  Once your roommates have paid up, you can send one check to the landlord right from the WePay account.
2. Rather than adding up and splitting shared expenses at the end of every month, you can just collect money from your roommates up front, and use a WePay Visa® debit card for all shared expenses. That way, it’s really easy to separate shared expenses from personal ones, and for you and your roommates to maintain complete transparency when spending shared money.
3. WePay adds a degree of social pressure – rather than one roommate chasing down the other three for rent, all the roommates can see who has paid and who hasn’t.
4. With WePay, you can keep all your roommate related expenses in one place, so the record keeping happens automatically. No more debates about finances or passive aggressive notes on the refrigerator.

Stop hassling with roommates. Try WePay today, it’s free to sign-up!