Imagine sharing an apartment with several roommates. If you tried to split the electric bill evenly but one roommate complained about it, would you insist that this is the best way of handling the bill, or would you do some math to make sure it really is “fair”?

In this story, one man is in this situation, and he decides to do some extra calculations. Now, there’s no way his roommate can argue about what’s fair.

Let’s read all the details.

Roommate thinks his share in payment is not fair, so I calculate the fair price

Some backstory:

In university, me and two of my friends decided to rent a flat together.

When we were living there for one year, I met my girlfriend and she came to our place quite often. After another year or so, she finally moved in with us, paying her part of the rent.

He had two very different roommates.

One of my friends was a great roommate: always kept the shared areas clean, wasnt too loud and always helped out with stuff.

However, the other roommate was of the kind that made you want to never live in a shared flat again. Smoking weed and probably doing some drugs in his room, making a lot of mess without cleaning it up and so on.

Lets call him Alex.

Now on to the story:

They were finally all going to go their separate ways.

So after nice roommate finished university, we didnt want to live alone with alex cause we constantly had to clean up after him.

We found another place and everyone moved out (he didnt even help us renovating the place to get the deposit back and we had to throw away his old furniture and stuff he didnt want to take with him).

After moving out we had to do some late payments for heating, water and running costs, in total a bill of ~1050€.

These payments were for the year where gf was not living there yet, so i payed the bill and told everyone I’d get one third of the bill, so 350€.

Alex thought the bill should be split 4 ways.

Next couple of minutes I get a text from Alex:

Alex: “Dont we have to divide it by 4? You forgot gf!”

Me: “The bill is from 2018 where gf wasnt living with us, so only the 3 of us have to pay it”

Alex: “But thats not fair at all! She was at our place constantly, using water and electricity so its her job to pay for it too.”

I’m sure this isn’t going to end well for Alex!

Me: “If you really want a fair payment I can calculate a price for everyone by looking up how much they used.”

Alex: “Well if you take her into account, thats fine for me.”

He wants payments to be fair? Time for malicious compliance!

OP knew Alex used more heat than anyone else.

In Winter, he was always smoking with his window open while having the heater fully turned on. He generally never closed his window and sometimes left it open when he left our place.

Because he wasnt helping at renovating the place, he wasnt present when our landlord reviewed the renovations. The Landlord was also reading the consumption of each rooms heater.

To no surprise, his rooms number was extremely high. Even the landlord made a remark about it being far from normal for such a small room.

In our bill, the consumption was listed too.

The numbers did not work in Alex’s favor!

From the total of 1050€ i calculated the proportion of heating costs. All other costs were seperated by 4.

From the heating costs, i substracted the costs of the common areas and divided them by 4, too. Then, i calculated the costs of every room we individually used.

Because Alex caused around 45% of all heating costs alone, he should pay 45% of all heating cost if our payments should be fair!

There was no way Alex could argue with the numbers now!

So I showed my calculation in our group chat and the new share of the bill everyone had to pay.

Now, Alex had to pay 380€, 30€ more than before, while nice roommate had to pay significantly less.

Alex just responded with “Thats ok.”.

Alex should’ve just paid the bill instead of complaining about it. At least now it’s “fair.”

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

That is neat!

Another person shares a disagreement he had with his roommate about splitting the bills.

It is nice!

I’m glad he didn’t!

Arguing can just make the situation worse.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.