This post is by Susan Johnston of partner site U.S. News & World Report.

Whether you rent a beach house on the coast or cruise down Route 66 on a road trip, spreading travel costs among a group can not only save money, but make a getaway more fun. However, when people have different ideas about how to split the bills or even how much to spend, a relaxing weekend away can quickly turn into a tense standoff.

Just ask Philadelphia resident Katharine Paljug, who takes a beach trip to South Carolina each spring with a group of friends. The group devised a system that involves totaling receipts from food, alcohol and activities and calculating how many people were there each day, since they tend to come and go. Then each person contributes based on the number of days they were there and the amount they spent on expenses.

That system worked well until this spring, when one person decided she should be exempt. "When my husband emailed everyone asking for receipt totals, she sent back an itemized list of the food she had eaten over the course of the two days she was there as an explanation of why she shouldn't owe anything," Paljug says. "I had to explain that assigning value to individual meals and drinks was a crazy way of managing things, would be nearly impossible to figure out and would make everyone hate each other."

The traveler still refused to contribute to shared expenses, and Paljug doesn't expect to see her at the beach next year.

This post comes from Michele Lerner at partner site Insurance.com.

Your car insurance coverage may need to change depending on where and when your college student drives. Whether your student drives your car or someone else's, contact your car insurance company for a quick policy update.

"Parents should always alert their car insurance company if their kids are coming home for the summer or going away to school," says Penny Gusner, a consumer analyst for CarInsurance.com. "It's always better to be upfront and to be sure they're covered. Every insurance company has different rules about how college students are insured."

Here are 6 summer situations:

1. Your student owns a car and comes back home from an out-of-state campus.

If your student borrows your car instead of driving his own once or twice, then your car insurance will cover any claims in case of an accident, just as it would if a friend borrowed the car. Your college student's insurance would provide secondary coverage, says Gusner.

Paper or plastic? That is the question for Natalie Gunshannon, who's suing the McDonald's franchise that forced her to accept her wages in the form of a fee-heavy debit card versus a paycheck or direct deposit.

The class-action lawsuit, filed last week on behalf of Gunshannon and other former and current employees of a McDonald's in Shavertown, Pa., alleges that the payroll debit card, issued by Chase, carries numerous fees.