Did/Do/Will You Charge Your Adult Kids Rent While Living At Home?

And how did you arrive at an amount?

Our financial arrangements with our kids and how we came up with the amount

I have mixed feelings about charging my adult kids rent. On the one hand, I want to offer a free place for them because I love them. On the other hand, this is real life, and my daughters need to learn that real life has costs. We ultimately did choose to charge our adult kids. But mostly the "rent" charged reflects some of the real costs of their addition to our household.

We are a family of 4 adults. I took some of the monthly expenses and divided them by four, charging each daughter one-fourth of those monthly amounts.

Each adult daughter pays:

• one-quarter share of utilities: heat, electricity, water/sewer, internet, garbage pickup
• one-quarter share of groceries, except the beef I buy from a rancher, but including the cleaning, laundry, and paper supplies
• the increase (not a quarter share, just the increase) in our car insurance having them as drivers of our singular car

The total monthly amount for each is relatively low. I figure they would have to pay for these items/services anyway if they lived on their own. 

I realize this type of arrangement with adult kids is variable, depending on circumstances. I do think it's helpful to see what others are doing under different circumstances.

If my daughters earned higher salaries, I might charge more. However, I would put the majority of that into a savings account for them, so they would have a little kitty of money to start themselves in their own places someday. 

Alternatively, I might request they set aside a certain portion of their incomes for their own future. This is what we did with our son. He made a healthy salary just out of university. We allowed him to live at home while he saved a sizable chunk of money to put down on a house. We live in an area with very high home costs compared to the average income. Allowing him this extra time to set aside money for a house meant that he and his wife were in a good position to buy when interest rates dropped to historic lows.

I will add, when my adult kids were students and living at home, they lived here rent-free. However, they were expected to work in summers to help fund their tuition and fun things for themselves. It wasn't until they were out of university and working year round that we began discussions about charging rent.

What have you decided to do regarding charging rent for your adult kids living at home?

Have you ever refinished a deck railing?

I'm looking for advice today.

My project for the next few weeks is to refinish the railing to our deck. In past years, we've sanded and scraped flaking paint on the railing and repainted over it. Living where it's so wet most of the year, paint doesn't hold up well for us. 

So, we're going to sand all of the paint off the horizontal surfaces of the railings and use outdoor stain and seal instead of paint. For me, this means I have to sand off every bit of paint, years and years of layers of paint from the top rail and bottom rail. I'll use a grey solid stain (most coverage for a stain) on horizontal surfaces. The stain will need refreshing every year. However, reapplying stain is a lot easier than sanding/scraping and repainting.

Being vertical so water sheds easily, the balusters and support posts for the railing seem to hold the paint well. So, I'll paint all of the vertical surfaces, instead of stripping and staining those parts. I'll use a black paint on vertical surfaces. I'll need to repaint these parts every 5 years or so.

For this project I bought a disk sander designed for stripping paint. It works pretty well, but this is still an involved process. I've worked 2 days so far and have removed the paint from the majority of about half of the top railing. I should have the majority of the entire top rail done by the end of the weekend. I'll still need to go in with scrapers and sand paper to get the bits that are close to the upright posts where the sander couldn't reach. I'll also need to sand and scrape the bottom rail by hand, as the balusters are too close together for the sander.

My questions -- has anybody here ever refinished a deck railing? Have you stripped outdoor paint from wood surfaces? If so, did you sand it off or use chemicals? Do you have any tips for scraping/sanding paint in tight areas? Have you used any special tools for sanding or scraping? Thank you for any advice you can offer.