Having a Roomie or Going It Alone: A Cost Analysis

One question a person fortunate enough to be single asks at some point: "Should I get a roommate or live by myself?"

In my area, decent one bedroom apartments are around $550 a month and decent two bedroom apartments are around $700 a month.

Living alone, rent for a year costs $6600.
Living with one roommate and splitting rent equally, rent for a year is $4200.

One concern is that the roommate will bail on you and leave you with a much higher rent bill. So I crunched some numbers, ground them up, mashed n bashed them around, and came up with the following:

- Splitting a $700 rent bill equally leaves you owing $350 per month. That's a $200 monthly savings over the $550 cost of living alone.
- If you're stuck paying for the two bedroom apartment by yourself, you're paying $150 more per month than if you'd rented the single bedroom apartment.

So let's say that you manage to keep your roommate for five months before he/she bails on you. During that five months you've saved $1000 thanks to the cheaper rent. For the remaining seven months, you'll spend an extra $1050 paying both shares of the rent. So in this scenario you lose $50 for the year and have a two bedroom apartment to yourself for half the year.

I think that's pretty cool: even if you can only keep roommates for less than half a year, you're still no worse off than if you lived alone, and if you can keep a roommate for more than that, you save money.

Getting a GOOD roommate is another story though...