Roommate leaves for summer internship, subleases room for $1,650 without consulting housemates, leaves 2-week gap at end of contract and expects them to cover the rent: 'I'm subsidizing your rent'

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  via Toa Heftiba

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• Living with roommates requires a certain amount of trust. Not a huge amount, necessarily. You don't need to become best friends. But you do need to trust that everyone is operating under the same understanding of how things work. That's why stories like this are so frustrating to read. And although the money part it's quite important, well, really important. What's even moreshocking is the fact that this roommate seems to have made every single decision completely on his own and then acted surprised when everyone else wasn't thrilled about it.

  He got an internship and needed to sublease his room. Fair enough. That's a pretty normal thing to do. But instead of treating it like a shared housing situation where other people might deserve some input, he apparently decided to play landlord for the summer. He picked the tenant, set the terms, chose the end date, and signed the agreement before even showing the contract to the people who would still be living there. That's the part that would annoy me. There's a certain type of person who mistakes making decisions alone for being helpful. They create a plan, execute it without consulting anyone, and then expect praise for all their hard work. Meanwhile everyone else is left dealing with the consequences.

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  via Getty Images

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• The irony is that he wasn't exactly making sacrifices here. He was charging $1,650 for a room that was costing him around $1,117. Good for him, honestly. If someone is willing to pay that amount, that's his business. But the second you start making money from an arrangement, it becomes a lot harder to frame yourself as the generous one who's "subsidizing" everyone else. That's where his argument completely falls apart for me. The vacancy at the end of the sublease didn't happen by accident. It wasn't caused by the roommates. It wasn't caused by the landlord. It was created by the person who chose the dates in the first place. If I book a hotel room for the wrong week, I don't get to send my friends a bill because the room ended up empty.

  I think that's why so many people reading this story are siding with the roommates. It's not really about two weeks of rent. It's about accountability. If you make a decision entirely on your own, you generally own the outcome, both the good parts and the inconvenient parts. The roommate seems perfectly happy to claim ownership of the profits. It only feels fair that he takes ownership of the gap, too.

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  via Lisa Anna

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