Choosing to live off-campus is a big step – especially when you throw a roommate into the mix! Without a Residential Adviser around to keep the peace, even BFFs can get in a snit about money matters and paying the landlord. We got in touch with Evan Silverman, the CEO of WilliamPaid, for more about WilliamPaid’s online rent paying service.

00dann / dann toliver

What is WilliamPaid?
In a nutshell, we help renters & roommates collect, manage, and pay the rent online with more flexibility than they’ve ever had before – with a credit or debit card or direct debit from their bank account.

Each roommate can choose how they want to pay, without sharing their payment method, and have one payment sent to the landlord. With no more “first of the month” drama, I guess you could say that WilliamPaid helps add a little roommate harmony, even if it is just once a month.

Also, should the roommate opt-in, WilliamPaid can have their portion of the rent reported to a credit bureau each month. There are roughly 50 million Americans with little or no credit, many of whom are young adults. We don’t think that college students and recent college graduates should have to go into debt just to build credit, so, WilliamPaid provides an alternative.

So – college students who choose to live off-campus can build credit? How does that work?
Yes, they can – we’ve partnered with the nation’s leading provider of alternative credit data to report rent payments made through WilliamPaid. It’s really simple – when setting up a rent payment, a user can opt in for credit reporting, and then — we’ll do the rest.

As a benefit, the user will receive their updated credit score on their personal homepage, each month, so they can monitor and track how they’re doing. As they see their credit build, hopefully this will begin to create motivation to continue – sort of like someone trying to lose weight – when they step on the scale and actually see their weight go down, they’re motivated to keep going.

sarawestermark / Sara Westermark

Paying your rent (since you have to do it anyway) makes it easy to build your credit file with payments you’re already making. And, with the passage of the Credit Card Reform Act, access to credit for college students has become much more difficult, so finding non-traditional ways to build credit can only help. Why should the landlord be the only one to benefit from your rent payments?

Why can’t roommates just “shake on it” – why do you think they should use your “official” roommate agreement?
All those courtroom TV shows wouldn’t be what they are today if roommates could just ‘shake on it!’  Seriously, though, ask anyone you know who has ever lived with roommates, which is pretty much everyone, and they’ll have a roommate from Hell story. We can’t eliminate all of those, but we think that by getting roommates talking, a lot of issues can be resolved.

In fact, the WilliamPaid Roommate Agreement creates a legal liability among roommates. After all, your lease is between you and your landlord – not your roommates.  So, a roommate agreement is sort of like a lease among roommates. And while it applies to all roommate situations, it’s even more ideal when one person is on the lease and another isn’t.

Our Roommate Agreement, hopefully, will get people talking – and agreeing – on everything from house rules and noise to security deposits and damage. Our interactive questionnaire forces roommates to determine how they want to live – and what the ramifications are to the others if they don’t live up to their agreements. As daunting as that may sound, it is really a fun exercise for a group of roommates – and as a result, they get a customized, personalized legal agreement.

*_Abhi_* / Abhi

We just have to know: where did the name “WilliamPaid” come from?
We were all sitting in our office shouting out different names with variations of bill and paid. Then lightning struck Jeff Golding, our Co-Founder & President and resident compliance, payment-processing aficionado (not exactly Mr. Creative), who blurted out WilliamPaid.

For a few seconds, we all stared in confusion until he looked at us like we were two year-olds and said, “William? It’s long for Bill. Bill Paid. Get it?” And so WilliamPaid was born.

What’s the WilliamPaid Challenge?
Currently, we have a young woman, Katya Fernandez, documenting her journey on what we call the WilliamPaidChallenge. The challenge is based on the WilliamPaid Principal Principle: The fastest way to eliminate student loan debt is to reduce unnecessary indulgences and apply those savings directly to student loan principal. Small additional principal payments can save thousands in interest costs and decrease the years needed to repay loans.

I know that this challenge doesn’t have much to do with paying rent per se. But, in the lives of people like Katya, student loan payments can be as much as rent payments — and if we can help make paying the two a little bit easier then we’re doing some good.