Home Exchange - Questions About The Bills
During the past few weeks I seem to have received more than the usual questions from people interested in Home Exchange, but who are concerned about who pays the phone, utility and heating bills.
The phone bill is easy—everyone pays for their own calls. Having said that, these days a great many people travel with their cell phone(s) and never even use a land line. I made two earlier posts on this very subject and you can click the links below to read them:
As you will see, a great many phone companies offer free or virtually free phone calls, all you have to pay is a flat monthly fee. If you are, or plan to be, a serious home exchanger, I suggest you look into one of these services. We switched from AT&T to Vonage a year ago last May and after a year with the new service I calculated that we have saved in excess of $2,000!
As for the remaining bills: utilities, electric, gas, heating, etc., and of course mortgage, the property owner usually pays these as he / she usually does.
Bill paying responsibilities are something that needs to be agreed and documented in your Home Exchange Agreement. You can download some excellent samples of all the forms and documents you will need by clicking Here!
If there is likely to be a mis-match of usage (for example a large family setting up a home exchange with a much smaller one) then I suggest the smaller family provides bills showing what they paid at the same time a year ago and following the home exchange, the larger family pays the difference, if it is significant. Again, this is something that needs to be addressed and included in the written agreement.
Personally, I would not go to these extremes. As I see it, by taking part in a home exchange I’m already saving a huge amount of money on either hotel bills, or a vacation rental—even more if we exchange cars—so picking over the utility bills following the event, would, to me seem to be somehow ungracious.
As with the references I made above regarding phones, you can use the link below to an earlier post covering general bill paying.
Just let fair play and common sense prevail.
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