Shared groceries expenses between roommates to be divided as per specific consumption ratio and attendance
The solution to this problem is somewhat like grading on a curve. Use the consumption ratio multiplied by the attendance (which is also a ratio, out of 100 days) to calculate how much each person owes. This will leave you short. Then add together all of the shares in a category, determine the % increase required to get to the actual cost of that category, and increase all the shares by that %. Bren's comment is right on the mark.  The typical solution is to divide all bills by 5, and for special items, the person buying it just marks his name that it's not community food.  Your attempt at a granularity level this detailed is admirable, but produces false results. What happens when I claim to be a zero percent milk drinker but when someone gives me cookies, I have a glass of milk?  The effort to get true accuracy will cost far more in time spent than the results are worth. "For a personal finance forum, this is too complicated for sustained use and you should find a simpler solution. For a mathematical exercise, you are missing information required to do the split fairly.  You have to know who overlaps and when to know how to do the splits.   For an extreme example, take your dates given: Considering 100 days of calculation period,  If Roommate D was the only person present for the last 10 days, they should pay 100% of the grocery bill as they are the only one eating.   From your initial data set, you can't know who should be splitting the tab for any given day. To do this mathematically, you'd need:  But don't forget ""In Theory, Theory works.  In Practice, Practice works."" Good theory would say make a large, complicated spreadsheet as described above.   Good practice would be to split up the costs in a much, much simpler way." When I was in grad school (at an engineering school) my apartment-mates and I came up with this formula: Worked marvelously. "So your whole approach, and the attempt to scale this is flawed.  You will alienate roomates, provoke arguments, and make everyone's life more difficult.  There are too many variables and unforeseen possibilities.  For instance: ""Why should I have to pay for Joe to go buy the expensive organic milk when I'm fine with the cheap stuff?"" ""I planned on being here for 20 days, but was gone that long weekend, recalculate everything please."" ""I already paid for this month, but now you're asking for more because James wanted to recalculate for a long weekend?"" The right way to do this is to set up loose, reasonable agreement among the participants and treat that as a contract, but with some flexibility/mercy on small dollar amount items. For instance: There are 5 of us, so everyone provides food (and shops/cooks) one night a week.  We're solo on Friday and Saturday (people eat out more then anyway), and everyone puts in $10/week (or whatever) for breakfast cereal, snacks, etc.  If you can't be here on your night, work out to trade with someone.  If you miss out on a meal... oh well. As long as people feel like they have a say in the discussion generating this and it's not dictated to them, then most of the time this is far superior.  If people need this level of detail, then perhaps those people should live alone or move in with Sheldon Cooper from ""The Big Bang Theory""." I asked how often grocery purchases are made in a comment, but I'm going to assume weekly for simplicity. If a roommate is present during the week following a grocery purchase, then they owe a share according to their preferences as you outlined them above. You will have to track the grocery cost by category for that week and calculate the balance owed by the person for that week. If there is a partial week where most expect to leave for a holiday or otherwise, then fewer groceries should be purchased for that week, and the cost of shares will decrease accordingly. One need only indicate preferences once, and weekly attendance thereafter. The only issue remaining is to determine how to record shares. If a normal person consumes 3 shares of milk, and .5 shares of butter, and so on, you simply add up all of the milk shares for the week and divide the milk bill by those shares. Same with the butter. The downside of this method is that you have to predict consumption in advance, so you may instead calculate by consumption after the fact with a deposit paid by all to create the initial grocery supply which will be refunded when that person leaves the grocery purchase co-op, and shares are calculated by who participated in the week prior to the grocery purchase. This also allows for a mid-week refresh if any commodity incurs higher than expected consumption, with the mid-week bill being added to the end of week refresh trip.
The price-earnings ratio is calculated as the market value per share divided by the earnings per share over the past 12 months. In your example, you state that the company earned $0.35 over the past quarter. That is insufficient to calculate the price-earnings ratio, and probably why the PE is just given as 20. So, if you have transcribed the formula correctly, the calculation given the numbers in your example would be: 0.35 * 4 * 20 = $28.00 As to CVRR, I'm not sure your PE is correct. According to Yahoo, the PE for CVRR is 3.92 at the time of writing, not 10.54. Using the formula above, this would lead to: 2.3 * 4 * 3.92 = $36.06 That stock has a 52-week high of $35.98, so $36.06 is not laughably unrealistic. I'm more than a little dubious of the validity of that formula, however, and urge you not to base your investing decisions on it. I think we have to divide it up into the elements that are 'real' and those that are 'abstractions'. Certainly, it will take a long time for a turbine to 'recoup' the embodied energy of its manufacture, transport, installation, maintenance. After that, tho, it's paying its way. 'Free' energy. Property values are made up, and - while important - I don't think it's fair to include them.   As far as $-per-watt hour goes, renewables can't/don't/won't compete with fossil fuels. Digging up millions of years of compressed sunshine has served us well. Looking at the bigger picture, however, renewables start to make sense, and are the only way forward. Any models that require maintenance of 20th century levels of consumption are unrealistic.  The future will be slower, more expensive, and less convenient. Your money management technique is a very personal choice. Each person's system will be a little different. For us, we don't believe in debt so we operate on a cash basis for everything with the exception of our house. We keep our expenses to roughly 75% of our after tax income. The rest we save and invest. And we are paying extra on our mortgage to get the house paid off asap. Each person will divide their 75% differently based on your consumption preferences.  The same goes for the 25% savings and investing.  You need to set some goals and save accordingly. "I think the problem is that you've made a math error. This child would not be costing you 300 per month, it will be costing you 1400 per month.  1100 of this is in a donation of salable hours rather than cash, but helpfully you have a number right there as to how much someone is willing to pay for these hours so the math is still doable. So, if you are indeed splitting your expenses fifty-fifty, you should chip 1100 into the pot to match your wife's contribution.  It would make the most sense, I think, to have your part of this contribution cover some of your mutual expenses, and if any is left over, save it up for the day that your child would cost more than that 300 in a month - when you need extra clothes, or have to replace something they destroyed, or want to pay for extra opportunities (camps, educational games, lessons), or a a savings that can be used for major future expenses (higher education, first car, milestone celebrations, safety net when starting out). Of course, if your family is indeed a priority, you might consider making an equal investment in your family - say, half your income (1800) to match half her time going into the building of the family.  After all, the decision to start a family should be an investment of time and value, not just a minimum bid for expenses.  And again, any extra can be spent on mutual expenses, saved up for future costs, or left as your child's ""savings"" for major expenses or safety net. I suppose I should mention that you perhaps could get away with covering half her contribution (550 per month, on the face of it), as that should also ""balance"" out the monthly expenses.  Even this much would be enough to put her back into the green on her covering her own costs.  Of course, in this case you might want to take into account that while she's working 38,5 hours per week now, running a household is, I've heard, more closely equivalent to a 60-hour week, plus or minus being ""on call"" for a further 100 hours a week.  Trying to calculate the absolute minimum payment on your part to match the investment of hours on hers is likely to be a bit more tricky than just matching the salable hours not worked, if you're set on income ratios and splitting costs ""as they are"". Also, you might want to rethink your criteria for sharing income completely or what makes certain divisions of costs ""unfair"". You mention one reason it would be unfair is that you have a ""more stressful job"" - well, your job may well be more stressful than her job now, but it is likely to be less so than raising a child (her new job).  As for investment of time and energy for your education entitling you to a larger amount of pay, again, raising a child is likely to be a larger investment of time, money, and anxiety than your education, but her pay (or even share of the costs) doesn't seem to be balanced in response.  I'm not gonna tell you what is fair, that's for you to work out, just suggesting you really think it through before deciding what would be fair or not." "A.1 and B.1 are properly balanced, but ""Business Expense"" is an expense, not an asset. The T entries should be timestamped.  The time should be equal to the time on the credit card receipts.  This will make audit and balancing easier. A or B can be used, but if the the business is to be reimbursed for personal expenses, the accounts should be renamed to reflect that fact. More explicit account names could be ""Business expense - stationary"" and ""Personal expense - lunch"" or even better ""Personal expense - cammil - lunch"".  With a consistent format, the account names can be computer parsed for higher resolution and organization, but when tallying these high resolution accounts, debits & credits should always be used. When it comes time to collect from employees, only accounts with ""Personal expense"" need be referenced.  When it comes time to collect from ""cammil"", only net accounts of ""Personal expense - cammil"" need be referenced. An example of higher resolution, to determine what ""cammil"" owes, would be to copy the main books, reverse any account beginning with ""Personal expense - cammil"", and then take the balance.  Using the entries in the question as an example, here's the account to determine ""cammil""'s balance: Now, after all such balancing entries are performed, the net credit ""Personal expense - cammil"" is what ""cammil"" owes to the business. The scheme for account names should be from left to right, general to specific." "You are confining the way you and the other co-founders are paid for guaranteeing the loan to capital shares. Trying to determine payments by equity distribution is hard. It is a practice that many small companies particularly the ones in their initial stage fall into. I always advise against trying to make payments with equity, weather it is for unpaid salary or for guaranteeing a loan such as your case. Instead of thinking about a super sophisticated algorithm to distribute the new shares between the cofounders and the new investors, given a set of constraints, which will most probably fail to make the satisfactory split, you should simply view the co-founders as debt lenders for the company and the shareholders as a capital contributor.  If the co-founders are treated as debt lenders, it will be much easier to determine the risk compensation for guaranteeing the loan because it is now assessed in monetary units and this compensation is equal to the risk premium you see fit ""taking into consideration the probability of default "". On the other hand, capital contributors will gain capital shares as a percentage of the total value of the company after adding SBA loan." "Two points. Someone has mentioned ""don't do the starbucks coffee"" thing... Try not to pay for fast food, either. They might not like you having cooking equipment in your dorm, but things like sandwiches and cereal don't require that (and often there is a common kitchen). Did you know oatmeal is so cheap it's basically free? Also dirt cheap and ridiculously nutritious: beans, lentils. There's certainly the ""ramen noodles"" stereotype but even beyond that, if you can learn how to cook a few decent things for yourself, you can do quite well. Oh, did I mention rice? On a related note, skip the bottled water and the sodas. (Especially the sodas, which can do you little good.) Snack on vegetables (carrots, celery, etc). They're not always cheaper than the cheapest of the cheap snacks that exist, but they're actually good for you. A big bag of carrots will give you a lot to munch and is reasonably cost-effective. Besides, I know you need more of them in your diet. Really. Finally, consider a summer job / internship. Not only will it earn you money now, but it might land you a much nicer job straight out of college, saving you years of earning less. (This goes triple for anyone studying computer science/engineering, by the way!!!) If that doesn't work out, consider summer-session classes. Sometimes they can work out cheaper than the regular kind." "...instead of all of us draining our money into a landlord... Instead, you are suggesting that still everyone (except you) will drain their money into a landlord, just that now the landlord is you.  I guess what that really means is that you will need to have landlord tenant agreements between you and your roommates. When things break or need replacing you'll have to foot the bill and as your tenants, your ""roomies"" might not be too forgiving when things need fixing. When the fridge breaks down, you'll have to buy a new one immediately. Yard work is your sole responsibility, unless you offer discounted rent or other perks. What about service bills: energy, water, sewage, internet, television, etc?"