The Shared Address — What Two People Should Write Down Before the Boxes Arrive

The lease is signed, the date is set, and the two of you have now spent four separate evenings talking about the sofa.

Not the money. Not whose name goes on the electric bill. Not what happens to the sofa itself if one of you moves out in a year. The sofa, as an object, in a room, where it will look nice. This is completely normal and it is also exactly how it goes wrong.

Because nobody falls out in the first month. They fall out in month fourteen, over a number neither of them wrote down, each completely certain what was said in the car.

The Shared Address is a record book, not relationship advice. It does not tell you what to agree. Your incomes, your lease and your state are yours, and a workbook that guessed would be confidently wrong somewhere. What it does is put the questions in front of you in an order that works, and give you somewhere to write the answers down while you still remember them the same way.

The second conversation — the one about money and ownership and what happens if this does not work — is not unromantic. It is twenty minutes, it happens once, and it is the reason the first conversation stays nice for years. Couples who have it are not less in love. They are just the ones who still agree about the sofa in March.

The Three Circles sorts everything in a shared home into yours, theirs, and ours. Two of those are easy. The third is small, it is the one nobody writes down, and it is where every argument you are going to have actually lives.

Not sure yet? Read five pages free — the cover, the whole method on one page, the first step, and one complete fill-in worksheet. No payment, no card.

What is inside

• 24 pages, eight fill-in worksheets, one named method
• The Inventory — filled in separately by each of you, then compared. The rows you disagree on are the entire reason you did it, and they are much easier to settle while they are still hypothetical
• The Lease Position — including the clause about tenant obligations that most people read for the first time only when something has already gone wrong
• The Split Sheet — equal or proportional, worked through with real numbers so you can see what each option actually costs each of you. There are only two honest answers and the argument is almost never about which one; it is about never having picked one
• The Household Accounts — whose name, whose card, and who actually handles it. Including the emergency contact on file with the building, which is frequently still somebody's mother from a previous address
• The Duplicates Ledger — you now own two toasters. One of them is going somewhere, and the money from it is somebody's money
• The Living Agreement — shoes, guests, the thermostat, how long a dish may sit. Filled in separately, because you each have an invisible rulebook and you have both assumed there was only one
• The Protection Sheet — what living together does not give you legally, which is more than most people think, and a page for recording what you were told and who told you
• If It Ends — ten minutes, once, written while you both still want to be fair to each other. Most couples never open it again, which is exactly the point

Who it is for
Two people moving in together, or two people who already did and never got around to any of this. It works best before the van arrives and it is still worth doing afterward.

What it deliberately will not do
It will not tell you what your lease says, what your state requires, or whether a cohabitation agreement is available where you live. Those differ by jurisdiction and they change. The book is built to make the conversation with somebody qualified shorter and cheaper, not to replace it.

Format
A 24-page PDF, US Letter, print at home or fill it in on screen. Two of the worksheets want printing twice so you can fill them in separately — that is the whole method, not a suggestion. One file, yours to keep and reprint.

Handbook House guides are educational materials for organizing your own records. This book is not legal, tax or financial advice and does not tell you what your lease or your state requires. It is also not the right tool where there is any question of safety, coercion or financial control — there are specific services for that, and paperwork is the least important part of what you need.