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 husband and I split things by % of income. First, we made a list of all household bills that we both benefit from - this includes everything from the mortgage to Netflix. Everything. We put it on a shared spreadsheet in Google Drive so we can both access it and update it. The sheet includes the bill description, the amount of it, the due date, and the frequency (weekly, monthly, annually), with another column to deduce the monthly cost of all bills based on frequency.
Next up we made a section for income, and totaled out what we each take home every month. This is AFTER taxes and insurance, what actually lands in the bank accounts. Then we take the total of all the bills and figure out what % it is of our total combined income. For instance if the combined income is 5000/mo and the total for all bills is 3500, then it’s 70%. Lastly, we then have a spot that determines what 70% of each of our monthly incomes are. So let’s say you bring home 3500 and she brings 1500 - in this scenario you would pay 70% of 3500, or 2450 monthly, and she would pay 1050. If you get paid twice in a month, divide that by 2 and you know what you each should contribute per pay period.
If you setup the sheet with proper formulas, you can just update the bills as needed, and change the income as needed, and it will update contributions automatically. This is the simplest version, but you can also include savings and stuff if you want as well. We opened a joint checking account separate from our main ones when we moved in together, and we transfer the money to it for bills each time we’re paid, and all bills come out of that account. Our personal accounts are kept separate and private, because anything left after bills and savings is our own money to spend or save however we like.
Personally I think this is the most equitable way of doing things. We ensure that all bills are paid and that we both have a bit of spending money. We’ve been together for 20 years, and have kept this system for most of it!