Shared Housing, Shared Lives by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781317202684
Google: tFQ7DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-25T04:38:16+00:00

The day-to-day organisation of finances

We turn now to the day-to-day financial organisation of shared households. We encountered almost as many ways of organising household finances (rent, utility bills and other household expenses) as there were households. These different approaches did not map neatly onto tenure status, although more individualised forms of housekeeping were much more common in shared rentals, whilst more collective arrangements of various kinds tended to be fairly standard in co-operatives and cohousing. Some households had created incredibly complicated spreadsheets and other systems to record and divide up every last household expense. Ellen, for example, described how this had worked in her co-operative, based on a calculation of each individual’s specific use of resources:

Basically we’ve got a house account and (co-resident) works it all out and adds it all together and then she gives us a monthly total. So we all pay, we’re basically paying the rent, Council Tax, gas, electricity, some of us erm, we’ve got an organic veg box, so some of us pay that. Water, TV licence, I’ve got wine here, some of us buy wine, TV together (laughs). Erm cleaning, we’ve got a cleaner comes once a week. Shopping we do a big online Tesco shop and then a sort of miscellaneous column. Yeah. So you all get just a single sum at the end of the month that covers all of that.

Other households adopted a much more relaxed approach on the assumption that costs would ultimately balance out over time. In an example of this more laissez-faire approach, Farah, who also lived in a co-operative, stressed the importance of having a positive attitude towards managing shared consumption in this way:

Basically you, you just gotta think if you relax a little bit, it’s all a bit easier. It’s like people have different amount of showers, people use the telephone different amount, people use electricity different amounts, at the end of the day, roughly, it hopefully all merges out and people hope, yeah – as long as you don’t hold resentment, then it’s not a problem.

Nonetheless, behaviours which could be interpreted as freeloading could be a source of tension in all kinds of shared housing. Some sharers appeared happy to take advantage of the generosity of their housemates. We heard several accounts from sharers of the replenishment from time to time ‘as if by magic’ of everyday household commodities such as washing up liquid, replaced not by them but by other household members, such as Simon, who were more communally disposed. Simon lived in a large private rental and took a dim view of housemates who wanted all the benefits of access to communal resources without any of the costs. He gave the specific example of a shared supply of biscuits:

About four of us replace biscuits in the biscuit tin every few days. Er, but again that … like the other day I saw someone come in, shake the biscuit tin, look sad, then go out and buy biscuits but put them in their cupboard.

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