Hacker News Reader

Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

And I just recommended this to a family member about a week ago :(

This scenario happens on family vacations all the time. If you've ever gone on vacation and rented a big house for 3-4 families, you end up having to split the grocery bill, dinner bills, group activities; it's a huge pain, everyone has to always keep cash on them to divide the cost right away or people forget.

View on HN

Protip: keep an envelope of pre-split money. Anytime money is added to it, every contributor adds an equal amount (or whatever agreed-upon proportion). Money can then be spent from the envelope without splitting.

Also useful on long road trips where gas money is being split.

While the app's a work in progress (and if you forgive the shameless shill), Splitsies (http://splitsies.net) does more or less the same thing and is freely available in the App Store.

Doesn't do groups yet (because I haven't worked out how to make them awesome yet) but its coming...

If you've ever gone on vacation and rented a big house for 3-4 families

A mistake you will make only once, believe me. Everyone paying his own way UP FRONT is the only way to make these sorts of things work.

The way to do this is to start a kitty upfront into which everyone places $X and all group spending comes from there, no-one pays for anything in common individually. Every time it runs low, everyone puts in the same again. Anything left over at the end you blow on booze and/or give to charity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com