About a century ago, it used to be quite the done thing – that if you had an extra room, you took in a lodger to help pay the bills. These days, we certainly do need help paying ourrent, our mortgage or our utility bills. Sometimes, we need help even putting food on the table. Only we no longer go out looking for lodgers. We go out looking for a roommate.

When we take on a roommate, we think people are going to be decent. We think a roommate will behave the way we would behave if we were going in as someone’s roommate. So, we just start the arrangement off on a handshake. We think that we don’t really need to talk about anything practical in great detail, because of how awkward these things can be.

Well, things can get pretty bad. It can be hard to get your roommates to be clean, it can be hard to get them to leave if you don’t get along, you can’t always take for granted that your roommate will be honest , and if he doesn’t pay what he promises to pay, in a month or two, you may be in terrible financial shape all of a sudden. You may find it hard to pay your own bills or even eat.

If you are living in a rental unit yourself, when you’re looking for a roommate, your landlord will actually often require that you run a background check on anyone that you’re asking to move in with you. That would really be a good idea for your own safety, as well. In fact, you can use a tenant screening service to quickly and cheaply look at this person up.

A good way to protect your good name and your credit, should your roommate decide to go off the deep end, would be to consider asking your landlord to write out separate leases for you and the roommate. If they agree to do this, you could be out of most kinds of danger.

A lot of the trouble to do with a roommate comes from not being explicit about all the rules. You need to work out who cleans what, how much quiet each person needs, what date one needs to pay up and so on.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to take a look at the landlord-tenant laws for your town when you’re looking for a roommate. Depending on your state or county, you can expect the law to provide landlords and tenants with a few special rights. You should probably take a look at your local legal aid society to really know.