Three siblings, one lake house: $4,400 a year each, and no family draft
An inherited lake house costs about $13,200 a year to keep. How three siblings split the bill, the chores and the summer weekends without a draft or a fight.
The AllDibs team
6 min read
Nobody buys a lake house with two siblings. You inherit one. The three of you grew up spending August there, your parents kept it running for forty years, and now it is yours together, along with a septic tank, a dock that comes out every October, and the question of who gets the last week of July.
Most families answer that question with a draft. Each sibling picks a week in turn, the order rotates every year, it feels fair, so nobody writes anything else down. This post is about what the house costs to keep, how three people split that when they do not use it equally, and why the draft is the part that stops working. The short version: the money is easier than it looks and the calendar is harder.
What a lake house costs a year to keep
Say the house is worth about $300,000, has been in the family long enough that there is no mortgage, and sits on a lake that freezes. It costs money whether anyone is in it or not.
| Annual line item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Property tax | $3,600 |
| Insurance, waterfront and seasonal use | $2,400 |
| Electricity, propane and internet kept on year-round | $2,100 |
| Opening and closing: dock in and out, water system, septic pumping | $1,200 |
| Repair and replacement fund, 1% of the house value | $3,000 |
| Mowing, plowing the lane and road association dues | $900 |
| Total | $13,200 |
- Cost per year to keep the house
- $13,200Cost per year to keep the house
- Siblings on the deed
- 3Siblings on the deed
- Each sibling's share
- $4,400Each sibling's share
Split three ways that is $4,400 each, or about $367 a month. For a house on a lake that is not much, and it is the reason most siblings keep the place rather than sell it. The number goes wrong in two ways, and neither of them is in the table.
The sibling who is there every weekend
The first is use. One of you lives forty minutes away and is up most summer weekends. One lives across the country and manages ten nights in August. One has small children and comes for two weeks and a few weekends. Call it 30, 10 and 20 nights. On an equal split the far sibling is paying $440 a night and the near one $147, and by the third summer somebody has done that arithmetic out loud.
The honest fix is to separate two kinds of cost. Everything in the table exists because the house exists, and every owner owes an equal share of it, because every owner holds an equal share of what it is worth. What a stay actually uses up, on top of that, is small: propane out of the tank, the electricity while the lights are on, firewood, a septic pump-out a year sooner. Put a flat nightly figure on it, $20 is near enough for most houses, and have each sibling pay it into the shared account for the nights they book. On the nights above, the near sibling pays about $400 a year more than the far one, and nobody has to feel that the house is charity for the person who moved away.
The sibling who does all the work
The second way the number goes wrong is labor. Somebody puts the dock in. Somebody drives up in April to see whether the pipes froze, meets the septic truck, calls the roofer, and keeps the road association happy. It is nearly always the sibling who lives closest, and within a couple of years the other two are not co-owners so much as guests of a caretaker who is starting to mind.
Why the draft feels fair and stops working
The draft feels fair because the order rotates. It stops working because the picks are not equal. There are about fourteen summer weekends and two holiday weeks that everyone wants, and about thirty-eight other weeks that nobody fights over. First pick takes a holiday week. Third pick takes the best of what is left, which is not much. Rotating the order means each sibling gets first pick one summer in three, so each of you spends two summers in three feeling a little shortchanged. And a draft held in February cannot cope with the cousin's wedding that gets announced in May.
Credits instead of picks
Treat the scarce weekends as currency, the way four families sharing one boat treat theirs. Each sibling holds a budget of summer weekend credits and a separate, larger budget of off-season credits. Booking a weekend spends a credit. Once the weekend has passed, the credit comes back. So nobody can hold the whole of July at once, everybody can plan months ahead, and when a request has to be turned down it is the calendar saying no, not your sister.
For three siblings, three summer weekend credits and eight off-season credits each is a reasonable start. Three credits means a sibling can hold the trip they are planning and the two after it, and cannot fence off a season. The two holiday weeks are the exception. Rotate those by year, write the rotation down through the end of the decade, and keep them out of the credit system entirely. Adjust the numbers, keep the shape. Our guide to sharing the family cabin shows how the credits work in AllDibs, with the credit coming back on its own once the stay is over.
Write these seven things down
Do this the first winter, while the place is still your parents' house in everyone's head and nobody is angry yet. A lawyer is worth an hour of fees for the first item. The rest is a page the three of you sign.
- How the house is held. Three names on the deed, or a small company that owns it with each of you holding a third. Which is better depends on your state and on what you want to happen to a share when a sibling dies or divorces, so ask a lawyer where the house is, not where you live.
- The monthly contribution and the shared account. About $367 each on the numbers above, into an account that pays the tax, the insurance and the propane without a conversation, plus the nightly charge for the nights you book.
- Who opens and closes the house, and what that is worth, decided the way the callout says.
- The repair threshold. Under $500 comes out of the fund without asking. Above that, two of three say yes. Above $5,000, all three do.
- The guest rule. Whether a sibling can lend the house to friends when they are not there, and whether that spends a credit. Decide it now. It is the argument most families have first.
- The holiday rotation for the two weeks that matter, written out year by year.
- The exit clause. Which sibling can buy a departing third, how the price is set (an appraisal both sides accept, or the average of two), and how long they have to pay. This is the clause that keeps the house in the family when one of you needs the money.
If you are not sure the house earns its $4,400 a year, count the nights you actually slept there last summer and run them through cost per use; the answer is usually yes, and it is worth knowing rather than assuming. If the answer is to keep it, the money is a shared account and a page you all signed, and the only question that comes up every spring is whose weekend it is. That is the question AllDibs was built to answer, free, for as many siblings as you have.
