Closing the books when you move out

The short version

Four things settle when somebody leaves: the last bills, anything the house bought together, the deposit, and any running balance from the months before. Do them in that order, on one page, and end with a single figure and a date.

The two that get skipped are the ones that carry the money. Bills covering a part month go by days in the house, not by heads. And shared furniture is still worth something, which the person keeping it should pay for.

The last bill goes by days, not by heads

You leave on the twelfth and the energy bill covers the whole month. Splitting it three ways charges you for eighteen days of somebody else’s heating, and it is the single most common thing a house gets wrong on the way out because it is the thing everybody does on autopilot.

Count person-days instead. Twelve days for you and thirty each for the two staying is 72 person-days, so the $186 divides into $31.00 and $77.50 each. It is the same weighting as splitting utility bills when usage isn’t equal, applied to a partial month rather than to a roommate who is never in.

Before any of that, photograph every meter on the day, with the date visible in the shot. A final reading settles the bill and the photograph settles the argument about the reading. Do it before the furniture moves, because an empty room photographs better than a full one.

The sofa question

Three people bought a sofa for $840 two years ago. One leaves. The sofa stays. Almost every house treats this as nothing happening, which quietly hands the person leaving a bill for a third of a sofa they will never sit on again.

Two ways to price it, and use the first if you can. Find a comparable second-hand listing, because what something sells for is what it is worth. If there is nothing comparable, straight-line it: a sofa realistically lasts about eight years, so 24 months into 96 leaves $630.00 of value. Split three ways that is $210.00 each, and the two staying pay the leaver $105.00 each to buy their third.

• Do it for things worth pricing. The sofa, the desk, the television, the vacuum. Not the mugs.
• Whoever keeps it, buys it. If nobody wants it, sell it and split what it fetches, which is also a valuation.
• Agree the life once, not per item. Furniture eight years, appliances six, electronics four. Arguing over each thing costs more than it moves.

Work out your own number

Put in the last bill, how many days of it you were actually there, and the one shared thing worth pricing. The result is what changes hands on the day you leave. The deposit is deliberately not in it, for the reason below.

The deposit does not come back on the day you leave

This is the assumption that causes the most bad feeling, and it is worth saying plainly. A deposit is normally held against the whole tenancy and returned once, at the end of it. A roommate leaving in the middle is not owed it by the landlord and is not owed it by the people staying either.

The arrangement that works is that the replacement buys the leaver out: they pay the leaver directly for the deposit share and take that place in the tenancy. On a $2,750 deposit split three ways, that is $916.67, and it happens between two people rather than through anybody’s landlord.

If nobody replaces you, the deposit share waits until the end of the tenancy, and that is worth writing down with the amount and the trigger in it. What a tenancy actually permits, and how a deposit must be held and returned, depends on the agreement and on local rules rather than on arithmetic.

The order to do it in

1. Settle the months before, first

Clear the running balance from ordinary living before you start on the leaving-specific lines, or the two get tangled and neither gets checked. The fewest payments that settle everyone up turns a pile of shared expenses into one net figure per person, which is the only form worth settling in.

2. Then the four leaving lines

Final bills by days, shared items by residual value, the deposit as a separate later line, and anything already paid ahead such as a broadband month you will not be there for. Put all four on one page with the figures on it.

3. Then one number and one date

Send it once, with the arithmetic visible, and name the day. “$179.00, by the 30th” is a request somebody can act on. When someone doesn’t pay you back covers what to do if the date passes, and it is much easier to have that conversation with a figure that was agreed in writing.

If a new person is arriving as you go, the house is also re-setting its shares, which is the setup problem rather than the settlement one: splitting rent and bills in a student house has that, and how to split shared costs fairly is the overview of choosing a method before the money moves.

Common questions

Every figure here was produced by running Halvy’s own split engine on the worked example, and the bill shares reconcile to $186.00 and the buyout to $210.00 exactly rather than to within a cent or two. Deposits, final bills and what a landlord may deduct are governed by the tenancy agreement and by local rules, which arithmetic cannot settle. Nothing here is legal advice.