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Back to school: setting money rules with new roommates
My freshman-year roommate and I went eleven weeks without discussing money, and then we had a fight about paper towels that I still think about.
Not even a big fight. It was more of a tense, polite standoff. Her name was Kayla. She was lovely, and she’d been buying all the paper towels and dish soap since August without saying a word. I genuinely hadn’t noticed. I thought they just… appeared. Like dorm magic. Somewhere around week eleven she mentioned, very carefully, that she’d spent “kind of a lot” on supplies, and I felt like the worst person alive.
We sorted it out. I paid her back, and we stayed friends all four years. But I’ve thought a lot since then about how easily the whole thing could’ve been avoided with one slightly awkward ten-minute talk at the start of the semester.
So if you’re moving into a dorm or your first apartment this month (or you’re a parent sending someone off who is), this is my case for having the money talk early. Like, while the boxes are still taped up.
The first-week conversation
I know it feels premature. You don’t want your very first real conversation to be about who’s buying toilet paper. But that’s sort of the point. When you talk about money before anyone’s owed anything, it’s just logistics. Nobody’s annoyed yet. Nobody’s been keeping a silent tally.
What you’re really trying to figure out in that first chat is what’s shared and what isn’t. That sounds simple, but it seems like every roommate pair lands on a slightly different answer. Some people want to split everything down the middle, groceries included. Others want to keep food totally separate and only share the boring stuff like cleaning supplies. There’s no right answer, as far as I can tell. The only wrong answer is not having one.
I’d also bring up the stuff that gets fronted. In a first apartment, someone usually ends up putting the internet in their name, or paying the whole electric bill and needing half back. In a dorm it’s smaller, but it still adds up, like the mini fridge or the rug that makes the room feel slightly less like a hospital. Figure out who’s paying for what up front, and whether it’s getting split.
Groceries are their own beast
Groceries are where I think most roommate money tension lives, because they’re constant and kind of fuzzy. Is the olive oil shared? What about the giant bag of rice? If your roommate eats two of your yogurts, is that a big deal or just life?
A system that seems to work for a lot of people is splitting staples and keeping personal stuff separate. Staples are the things everyone uses, like milk and eggs. Personal stuff is your weird oat milk or your roommate’s fancy cheese. Whoever buys staples keeps track, and you square up every so often.
Another approach, which my junior-year roommate swore by, is just taking turns. One week she’d buy the staples, the next week I would. It wasn’t perfectly even, but it was close enough, and we never had to do math. Close enough is underrated between roommates.
Keeping track without becoming that person
The hardest part, I think, is tracking the small stuff without turning into someone who sends a payment request for $1.87. Nobody wants to be that person. But nobody wants to be Kayla in week eleven either, quietly fronting everything.
A shared note on your phones works. So does a whiteboard on the fridge, which has the bonus of doubling as a place for passive-aggressive doodles. Some people use an app. OweMate, for example, keeps one running balance per person, so if you’re the roommate who usually fronts stuff, you can see at a glance what’s owed without digging through receipts. Whatever you pick, the goal is the same, which is making the number visible so neither of you has to remember it.
When it’s time to square up, keep it light. Something like:
Hey! Groceries and the internet bill for the month came out to $86 on my end, so you’re $43. No stress, send whenever.
Specific and friendly. No lecture required.
If something does start bugging you, say it early. A small “hey, I’ve noticed I’ve been buying most of the dish soap, can we switch off?” in October is so much easier than a big blowup in February. Resentment piles up faster than any bill.
And if you’re the oblivious roommate, like I was? Just own it. Pay up and grab the next pack of paper towels without being asked.
Kayla, if you’re somehow reading this, I still owe you a pack of Bounty. I haven’t forgotten.
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.