FINALLY some genius has come up with and easy way to keep track of splitting up costs between a group of people and I couldn't be more happy! I'm sure I have been owed (or owed someone else) for that last round of drinks while on a girls trip or for my share of groceries at a family get together, more than enough times. Let's put a stop to this madness! Plus who wants to stop the fun and do math even on a regular day, let alone during a fun trip? My friend Jamie is somehow always nominated to figure out all of our spending and who owes who on each and every girls trip we take together. She ends up with some nasty math equation on a restaurant napkin bringing out her best math skills while nursing her worst hangover. Jamie, this is for you friend...
My friend Kim just told me about this new app called Splitwise. I signed up right away and put it to the test on our most recent family vacation. Here's the deal...Splitwise helps you keep track of shared expenses and balances with housemates, trips, groups, friends and family. I can see how there would be a lot of benefit even if you aren't headed on vacation, but it is group trip gold.
The app is free and is handy because you can quickly add in expenses before you forget who paid for what. My favorite feature is that you can add in your expenses and divide them up equally among everyone in the group or just choose who you owe it to or who owes you. Real life example, there are five of you at dinner but only three of you shared that expensive bottle of champagne. You can easily track that in the app. You can also do recurring expenses if you have roommates, split by % and more. It takes all the awkwardness out of settling the bill. No one has to say, "Hey Brooke, I think you still owe me $20." because it will be accounted for in the app. Huge bonus- you can hook up your bank account and pay directly from the app, or use Venmo or PayPal and even record a cash payment.
I can't explain how helpful this was on our family vacation. It's so easy to just have one person pick up the bill and then separate it as needed. For our group there was a family of 4, 3 and 2 people. We could just pop in the amount of the bill and then the percentage each group owed (45%, 33% and 22%). It was easy when the girls and guys split up for the day and the percentages of who owed what for the bill changed. Just having one person point person for each group and at the end of the trip (or anytime we wanted to check in) you could see who owed each person and what amount. Man it's slick! Game changer for all group vacations!
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