I spent a year living in a beach house with 7 friends. Splitting the bills was surprisingly easy — other things weren't.

I loved spending a year living in one house with seven of my best friends.

Isabella Dallas During my senior year of college, I shared a home with seven of my friends in a popular beach town.

Because we split most costs evenly, it ended up being more affordable than we anticipated.

Fitting eight people with varying schedules into one home was hard, but it was worth the challenges.

There really is a difference between knowing your friends and knowing their shower schedules.

I found that out, among many other things — like how one of my friends watches the same 30 minutes of "Legally Blonde" on mute before bed, or how another likes to call unofficial dibs on the washing machine at 6 a.m. — during my senior year of college, when I moved into a six-bedroom house with seven of my besties for our last year of undergrad.

Living at the beach senior year was something everyone talked about on campus at San Diego State University — a college dream we'd heard about for years but never thought we'd actually pull off.

Suddenly, it stopped being a hypothetical when a girl who lived in a house in Pacific Beach, California, about a 20-minute drive from our school, said her place might be opening up.

A few of us toured it, and before we knew it, we were signing a lease.

As we were getting ready to move in, we couldn't wait for sandy feet, tipsy sunset walks, and spontaneous fish taco runs.

But we wondered if living in a popular beach destination would be too much on our wallets.

Turns out, it was cheaper and logistically easier than we ever expected.

The finances were split evenly, and we used a spreadsheet to avoid chaos It was challenging to squeeze eight people into one home, but dividing the finances was easy.

Isabella Dallas Our six-bedroom house was essentially a long rectangle with rooms attached to it.