Moving out of home can be a shock – there's nobody to do your cooking, cleaning or laundry – but with some imagination, you can make life a lot easier and cheaper, writes JONATHAN WYSE
FOR STUDENTS living out of the family home for the first time, house sharing will be a completely new experience. You can say goodbye to clean clothes, ironed shirts and brand name cereal. Prepare, instead, to abuse complimentary nibbles at parties as a cheap source of nutrition, to involuntarily adopt the stylish “just-out-bed” look at all times, and to build up a vast stock of condiments stolen from Abrakebabra.
Economising
Getting along with new roommates can be difficult, but there’s one thing that everyone can agree on – the need to keep costs down.
Cut down on the household consumption of costly toilet roll by using public bathrooms in college as much as possible. If you’re a hygiene nut, don’t go for the ones in the popular buildings. The higher and less populated the building, the cleaner they’ll be.
Hygiene in general can be costly, so be aware of how much you spend on luxuries such as soap and shampoo. To this end, any bathroom with a liquid soap dispenser not attached to the wall should also be regarded as a cost-saving measure.
Needless to say, any trip home for the weekend to “catch up” should leave your family home devoid of any toiletries.
Cleaning
You should also become quickly accustomed to “Sink Brinksmanship” – a game for two or more roommates in which the loser is the competitor who gives up first and cleans the kitchen, unable to tolerate the filth any longer. You will soon realise that there are no winners, except maybe the particularly belligerent germs that infest student kitchens.
Cleaning costs can also be reduced by sneaking small items into your roommate’s bag when they goes to do their laundry. Beware: this plan works best with same-gendered roommates.
Eating
Keeping costs down in the kitchen requires slightly more thought. Make sure that everyone knows which foodstuffs are yours by using passive-aggressive notes and labels with smiley faces, and establish a reputation early on in the house as “a complete psycho when it comes to food, like seriously”.
In prison, newbies earn the respect of other inmates on their first day by shanking someone with a razor blade. Similar but less extreme tactics will establish clear boundaries for your new flatmates, and prevent problems down the road. If you act easy-going, people will just walk all over you.
Borrowing
Exploit the generosity of your roommates by asking to borrow food on the pretence of “not having had a chance to get to the shops today”. Everyone knows this is a lie, since students have no more than an hour or two of lectures a week.
But a roommate with his new girlfriend over for the first time to watch a movie will never refuse to let you have some pasta, because this will make him look like a scrooge. Instead, he will say yes in order to make himself appear like a big shot who has large quantities of pasta at his disposal.
There is a good chance he will have forgotten your indebtedness by the end of the month, but do avoid him until then.
What if you find yourself in the same situation though? You’re having a girl over, and your roommate identifies this as a weakness which will prevent you from being mean. Fortunately, any request for food can be met with the following response.
“Sorry, Dave. I don’t have any at the moment because I’m on a low diet for my sports team.” This dodges a potentially expensive act of generosity, while simultaneously communicating to nearby girls that you are fit and good at sports.
It can often be very difficult to keep track of who owns what when it comes to particularly common or popular items (milk, eggs, bread, etc). Use this to your advantage by never buying them yourself, but make sure to always complain that someone is taking yours.
Not starving
If times are particularly tough, come up with creative recipes consisting primarily of these communal foodstuffs. For example, the typical student can subsist for weeks on a diet of eggy bread and tap water.
If your roommates are just as broke, this doesn’t mean automatic starvation. An unexpected visit to your girlfriend’d/boyfriend’s/rich friend’s house around dinner time is always good for a meal.
