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What is a fair way to split costs when my girlfriend moves in? (I own the apartment) (lemm.ee)

submitted 3 days ago by AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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)

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[–] BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

As others have said, there is no right answer but here are my thoughts based on my experience.

Mortgage

The apartment is under your name so I would expect you to pay the mortgage.

One thing you could do is that your girlfriend puts a share of the mortgage cost into a savings account under her name. It could be the equivalent of what she's paying now for her rent of the equivalent of your mortgage minus 30%.

This way if you stay together and decide to buy a new home you can both contribute to it with a nice down payment and if you split up you both get your marbles back.

It also levels your salaries and you are contributing equally to the housing cost so there is no resentment being built on your side.

Utilities and groceries

What I did with my girlfriend (now wife) is that we were doing a pro rata monthly contribution to a bank account that was used for everyday life. In your case you are earning 30% more then you can contribute 30% more to this account. Then everything like electricity, groceries, restaurants together ... Was deducted from this account.

It's quite easy to get a free bank account with two cards so we used that (we used N26 at the time but there are plenty of options, the bank account was technically a single person account with two cards but it did not really matter since we were not keeping a lot of money in it). We started by keeping track of all our expenses on an app like Tricount and regularly balancing our contribution, it's easy to set up but it requires to keep track of all our expenses and was quite annoying to do on the long term.

[–] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

To add to these ideas, I've heard of a 4 bank account system for couples.

Joint Checking where living expenses can come from.
Joint Savings for shared investments. Requires two signatures to move money out.

And then each gets a personal account with their spending money that each gets to do whatever they want with.