SpotMe Blog

Living Away From Family

Living away from family

A good roommate can make living away from family a memorable experience.

Becoming more mature

Living the days away from your parents makes your daily routines totally different: no one wakes you up for early classes, no one prepares your breakfast, no one cleans your clothes or room, or stays by your side when you are in trouble. You manage all of this yourself. You also learn to correct mistakes you make, and get better at running your life on your own. Independent life requires great responsibility, good concentration, and (surprise!), it makes you more mature. Day by day, step by step, there would be another “you”. You can confidently control your own life rather than depend on Mom and Dad.

Enjoying freedom

No matter how many difficulties you are going to face from living away from family, the greatest thing you can gain from this new life is freedom. Away from your parents, you can do many things without asking: going out with friends, registering for your desired classes or joining interesting clubs. Sometimes your parents might be so over-protective that you find it hard to do everything you know you want. Now that you are on your own, you face no barriers to your imagination, responsibly of course. Freedom will boost your ego, self-esteem, and motivate you to discover yourself.

Embracing new cultures

Imagine working or studying abroad! Traveling to a new country will give you many opportunities to make new friends or to meet interesting colleagues. Most of them come from different backgrounds and would have unique cultural values or perceptions. Getting along with them requires much effort and strong confidence. Adaptation will turn you into someone more knowledgeable, sociable and friendly, which are the important keys to your success in life.

Many young people think that living away from family is too much of a challenge, which they hesitate to overcome. However, consider this as a new chapter of your life, from which you can gain many valuable experiences. You will face problems like financial crises, homesickness or culture shocks, but your youthful energy and ‘dare attitude’ will help you defeat any challenge. No pain, no gain. Living away from family is a time of passage -- it will give you interesting lessons that you cannot learn elsewhere!

How to Find the Perfect Roommate

Looking for a suitable roommate is no easy job. A nice, friendly or funny person is not necessarily an ideal roommate. Finding the perfect roomie for yourself may require more effort than you may think. Here are a few useful tips to get you started.

Set priority

Some people search for roommates on Craigslist, college web sites or on other services designed for roommate match-making. Of course, finding a good roommate on the web is possible, but there are several other options to consider first: a friend (sure!), a friend of a friend, a relative, or an acquaintance. These options should be put at the top of your list, as the advantages they possess will make your search a lot easier! You won’t have to investigate the trustworthyness of a stranger – as you’ve already either known them before, or someone who you know would be able to provide a reference. If the other person is a friend, or a friend of a friend, you already might some things in common: getting used to each other will be easier. Only when you couldn’t find someone from your social network, should you think of a stranger. In that case, a same-age buddy or a schoolmate would make a nice choice.

Narrow the options

Now that you have a couple of roommate candidates on your short list, it’s time to take the next step. No matter if they are your acquaintances or strangers, the most important criteria to bear in mind are their character and lifestyle. Imagine how inconvenient it would be if there is no day-to-day compatibility between you and your roommate! It’s hard to deal with your early morning classes when your roommate always stays up late for noisy chatting. Or if you are a book lover who enjoys your world in deep concentration and quietness, you may find it terrible to live with someone who never turns off their streaming radio. Incompatibility will lead to unexpected conflicts. That’s why you should choose wisely – pick a person with as many shared lifestyle choices and priorities as possible.  If you can, spend time with your future roommate before you have to make a decision.

Make the final decision

And when it comes your final choice, be certain that the person you select is sincere and trustworthy, and that you can feel safe around them. Make sure they are capable of handling any arising issues between you two in good faith. Ask for references! Beware that because you’re like a family when you share your home with another person, only people who are honest deserve to be your roomie.

So, are you confident in your journey to find a good roommate? SpotMe hopes that this piece of advice will be useful for you.

What SpotMe Has To Give

SpotMe was first launched in July 2011 with the mission to help roommates, family and friends easily split bills and expenses. The recent update in version 2.2 adds many improvements including a more seamless Facebook integration via iOS6, further improving the user user experience.

Quick and easy access to the app via Facebook

Ease of use is our most important objective when we design new features or create improvements. While integrating with Facebook has been tricky due to frequent changes that Facebook makes in its API, with SpotMe Version 2.2 customers can now take advantage of the Facebook integration directly via their phone's Settings. SpotMe also allows users to authorize access to their friends’ contact information in the phone's address book or to enter a friend's email while creating a transaction. 

Split bills in groups

In addition to expense tracking when lending to or borrowing from a friend, among the most innovative features of SpotMe is the automatic balance tracking within groups. Not everyone can remember all payments that are split between friends in a group -- especially when the balance accumulates from various events such as sharing lunch, household expenses, groceries, traveling, movies and so on. It's not that a person's great memory, paper notes, or tiny notebook cannot help with this problem. But SpotMe makes it easy. Say that this month you owed Steven 40$ on the 4^th for a Costco shopping spree, but then you lent him and Jimmy (a mutual friend of you both) 30$ for a movie on 15^th. Now it’s the end of the month and your group has had quite a few more similar exchanges. So, who owes who and how much? Too complicated right? Never mind! That’s the duty of SpotMe.

Receive a push notification or an email alert when a new bill is split

The notification features on SpotMe can be completely customized. Customers can choose to receive push notifications when new events happen on SpotMe such as the creation of new bills, invitations to connect, or messages from friends. Also, weekly summary emails help everyone stay up date on their weekly transactions, and the overall balance with friends. SpotMe takes responsibility for this most sensitive matter. Each person is helpfully reminded of the payments she made, and the amount that she owes or is owed, without having to bring this up among friends.

Quite exciting, right? But this is not all that SpotMe has to offer. There is a lot more in the app such as photos, detailed descriptions, itemized bill splitting, even or uneven bill splits, free group messaging, custom groups, weekly or daily summaries, or support for international currencies. We regularly update the app with new features, or improve existing features, to make SpotMe the best it can be and to maintain its 5-star rating on AppStore.

Why we built SpotMe

SpotMe was born out of desire to create a simple and easy way to pay your friends. Our mission is to take something that people hate to do -- such as tracking split-bill balances with roommates and friends -- and to make it mobile, social, and super-easy.

Apps for splitting bills focus on rent calculators or on managing a person's share of due rent or a payment transaction such as a dinner bill. With SpotMe, we choose to focus on providing a social experience: a common view of shared bills between friends. When you travel in a group or when you live together, calculating a bill's share and tracking ongoing balances, or even splitting the rent, can be taxing on both your time and friendships. SpotMe takes out the inconvienience of calculating and tracking balances. Instead, a group of roommates of friends can focus on the things that matter to them, and use SpotMe as an easy to use, automatic rent calculator and bill splitter.

SpotMe has 5-star ratings in the App Store, and lots of happy customers. We want to make it better by hearing more of your feedback and suggestions. As we launch our blog today, we hope to create a forum where we can more easily communicate with you, our customers.

Whether you travel with a group of friends or rent an apartment, splitting bills and sharing expenses with SpotMe should be fun, reliable and easy. Let us know what you think, and how we can  make SpotMe even more useful. Comment on our blog or drop us an email at support@getspotme.com.

Also, if you use SpotMe to split bills, and love it, please show your support. Rate SpotMe in the App Store or share it on Facebook.