Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 178 | Should you Charge Rent if You're Housing Someone Additional?

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Ep. 178 | Should you Charge Rent if You're Housing Someone Additional? · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  And so what I think about is, first of all, when we have a room available in our house, we stamp it with a vision. Hey guys, welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. I'm your co-host, Jeff Bethke, along with my friend and mentor, Jeremy Pryor. Join us Monday through Friday as we chat about quick tips, skills, and ways to help equip you on your journey as a father to build your multi-generational family team on mission. Stay tuned.
• 0:31
  What's up, guys? Jeff and Jeremy here. Fun question today. This is from Chris in our homeroom group. And this is the question about should you charge rent if someone lives with you either to help out or just a college student or how much should you charge? How should you do it? And I thought it was a really, really good discussion because when you integrate into a multi-generational family team, one really cool asset to doing this is building up a household. And one way to do that is have someone live with you. I know we've had...
• 0:54
  four-ish or five people, I think, live with us over the course of seven years of marriage. Jeremy, you guys have literally a duplex you own that is just to host and have probably thousands of people come through that place. But yeah, this is something to think through. I love some of the caveats you said, Jeremy, so I'll let you share those. But what I will say quickly is there's not one exact answer. Yeah.
• 1:15
  And for those four or five people, we've almost done four or five different situations. So I would say be really mindful of what you're trying to accomplish. Are you trying to get help in the home? And then you can give rent as a value for that. Are you trying to do ministry and discipleship? Well, then that should be something else.
• 1:30
  Are you trying to do a mix of both? That should be something else. Are you trying to just have someone kind of be a decent bystander, like on your family culture that can hopefully be blessed and be kind of a safe place and not lonely? And maybe like college student that just needs an active presence in your life. I'd probably put that one in the ministry discipleship category. Then that plays out a certain way. So,
• 1:47
  A couple of rules that we like to do is we've charged rent all across the board. One thing we tend to do is we never have never charged the exact market rate. We always, even if it's just like a rental thing and there's not work exchange or anything, we still will come down 100 or 200 bucks, usually just because we see that as kind of like a ministry thing of people, someone being in our home.
• 2:04
  And then another one caveat we usually do and we have done is kind of like, um, you can do your own grocery shopping. You can have your own food, right? And you need to do that. But like, if you're going to join us at dinner, like we'll cover that. Like we want you to be at our table. We want you to be in relationship with us. So dinners are on us. You don't have to worry about that. And we'd love to provide that every single night. If you're going to be there, those are just kind of the caveats we've done. But Jeremy, how have you guys done this? And I'm more on the side of like exchanging it for work. And I love the, the way you kind of do it with the credit and work backwards, et cetera.
• 2:31
  Yeah, this is a big one for us because I love it when families do this. There are some major landmines. It's great to have a single live in your house. I always encourage this when you have especially a larger family, a lot of littles in a season like that, because having somebody there that can watch the kids
• 2:50
  that can help with various, we call them household assistance, oftentimes instead of nannies. We had a whole podcast about that. But I would say one of the biggest watch outs is if the reason, a lot of times when people open up a room in their house, they're basically like they put out almost like a shingle and say to their whole community, the whole world, we have a room that is available. And the first person who usually jumps is somebody who actually needs housing.
• 3:18
  Um, if their number one reason for moving in with you is because they don't have a place to live. Um, that is a bit of a red flag. Okay. Um, doesn't mean it's always bad, but I'm just telling you guys from experience, if that's the number one reason, and those are usually the most available people.
• 3:34
  They are looking for a place to live. They want to move out of a situation that's not super healthy or they don't like. And so if that's their number one reason, what I found is over the course of the first month or two, things start to fall apart because your vision may not line up with that.
• 3:50
  And so what I think about is, first of all, when we have a room available in our house, we stamp it with a vision. The vision for this room is X. It is, let's say, discipleship. So I'm going to find the most teachable person. We're going to hold this room open for somebody who wants to really learn from our family. Or this room is for a household assistant.
• 4:07
  We want the best person we can get that wants to really do life with our family inside the house and is willing to really help us. And so you have to be very clear about the vision for the room. If you have a room and you say this is for somebody who needs housing, that's fine. That's the vision. And make sure that you're clear about that. But it's really important to have a vision. And Chris's specific question was, you know, should you charge rent? What we do...
• 4:32
  let's say we stamp over a particular room, a household assistant. Well, what we've learned over time is that if you say to somebody who comes in, they'll oftentimes say, oh, this is great. I'll love to like, I'll help out for 10, 20 hours a week. That'd be great. Usually over the course of like a two or three month period, that 10 or 20 hours will turn into like 10 and then turns into seven and five. And I've had a lot of friends who are literally like,
• 4:56
  Like we have somebody who's living in our house to help our family and they're not, they haven't spent one hour helping our family this whole week. And that's, that's it. And so they're like, do we kick them out? What do we do? And so what we do, what we tell people is this is the best way to set this up is to actually have a rent amount. Like Jeff said, maybe a little bit below market rate. So let's say that's, that's $300 a month or $400 a month. Then you could have kind of a generous hourly rate, 10, $15 an hour. And you basically say, I want you to track your hours. You're helping our family and it comes off your rent.
• 5:26
  So if you have a really busy month, you're a student and you need to really study, fine, you'll need to pay a little extra rent. But that incentivizes them to actually work for the house, which over the course of months is hard to do. The last thing I'll say, you guys, is it's often important to actually have an expected end date for these. For us, it's three to six months is usually when it starts to feel like...
• 5:49
  It doesn't make a lot of sense for us to keep doing this because at least when you're especially stamping discipleship as a major reason you're doing it, then I would say integrating them in an indefinite way in the household, usually it can end really poorly because after about seven or eight months, somebody's got to decide, do we kick them out? Is it not working anymore? So having a check-in date or an end date can really protect that relationship in the event that it's really...
• 6:18
  It does expire, and we're having to have an awkward sort of conversation about that. But those are just some ideas for how to do this. But we really encourage this, man. If you could figure this out, this is such a blessing, both to that single person and to the family.
• 6:33
  Hey guys, one of our favorite places to hang out on is the family teams, Instagram. That is where you will find tips, quotes, tricks, and a bunch of other conversational things to help you build your family team on mission. If you're on Instagram and you want to get encouragement as you do this and build your family team, just head over to Instagram and follow us at family teams.