Rent a room - should it include ESB bill?

B

breaks

Registered User
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31
Hi,
I was just checking through the documents for rent a room again.
Should the amount you charge the tenant include all bills?

For example, suppose the rental income is 8K but the bills are 2.5K. The total 10.5K exceeds the 10K so what happens?

This seems almost unreasonable.
What happens if the tenant is a very high consumer and their bills are absolutely huge (long distant phone calls, huge ESB and GAS bills)?
 
If the tenant, living in your own home, is consuming large amounts of ESB/Gas, are you not also there ? You need a policy on consumption. ALso, for long distance phone calls, they need to use their own phone or get prepaid phone cards. That would resolve that.
 
Usually the utility bills are split between the co-habitants and not part of the rent payment. But have a quick look at daft.ie for shared rental rates in your area to guage what the market value is.
 
Yes am there. But haven't done any of this before. Thanks for all your answers.

Some of the info they provide is bizarre.
Have a look here:
http://www.citizensinformation.ie/categories/housing/buying-a-home/owning-a-home/rent_a_room_scheme

It says that I have to pay for the food as well.

"The total (gross) rent you receive (which includes sums the tenant pays for food, laundry or similar goods and services) cannot exceed €10,000. If you receive rental income over and above this amount, you are not entitled to the relief."

My plan is going to be make sure to charge rent that is considerably less than the 10K per annum. This will mean the ESB, heating bills etc when split should not come to the 10K.
 
breaks said:
It says that I have to pay for the food as well.
Click to expand...

It doesn't say anything of the sort. They mention sums paid for "food, laundry or similar goods" to cover situations where a householder might spuriously claim RaR by claiming that a percentage of their rental income wasn't rent at all but was for food and other costs supposedly incurred by the tenant.
 
Well sorry I am bit confused :-( It says the tenants foods not the householders food. So the tenant can put their food on rent relief. Sounds very odd.
 
What it says is in practical terms is that you can not charged say €800 for rent and €10 per day for food if you were to provide them with meals.
But I presume you are not going to cook and feed everybody everyday, so don't worry about the food.
 
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