My girlfriend and I are planning to move in together in ~3 months.
I own a small apartment in Amsterdam, my mortgage, heating, water and electricity is about 2000 Euro a month, and I earn 30% more than she does.
Some context: Amsterdam is damn expensive and in an housing crisis, since living here she’s been paying about 1000/m to rent a room. Both of us earn quite well and money isn’t tight
What is a fair way to split costs? I’ve heard everything from she should live here for free because I was paying for everything anyway to we should split everything 50/50, and I’m not sure what is fair.
I don’t think 50/50 is fair, because the way I see it, I’m going to get back a fair amount of the money I pay to my mortgage when I sell the apartment.
So what is fair? My gut feeling is something like we split the heating, electricity, groceries etc. 50/50. And she pays say 500 Euro a month for living here (less than half what she’s used to paying in rent)
My wife and I lived together for a bit back when we were dating. We did some math:
Combined rent + $savings = my old rent + her old rent
Then we split the combined rent roughly 1/3 - 2/3 (my salary was higher than hers at the time) so that we were both paying less than we had been before.
We split utilities 50/50 which was kind of a mistake IMO – I regret the accounting chore that it created. One of us would pay the rent by hand (USA, so paper check to the landlord), but utilities were on auto-pay from my account. We’d have to tally up utilities and add it or subtract it to the rent in order to reimburse the other person when they paid the rent.
Instead of that nonsense, I’d suggest estimating your utilities and split that figure 50/50 - then maybe look at it again once a year in case costs change.