Rake in NL home game(s)

[BigToga]

I've hosted a home game for years and, for the first year, we asked everyone for "donations" to cover beer, food, cards, etc. It just happened that, as time went on, people expected those things to be there but "forgot" to donate or flat out refused saying things like, "Well, I don't drink and I don't eat." We finally went to, after much thought, to a $2 drop on all pots over $10. If it's a small pot, you drop $2. If it's a big pot, you drop $2. Over time, it evens out so that it's probably less than 2.5% of all pots. We do it to cover our costs for chips, cards, etc and no one gets upset at all.

What finally made the decision to rake easier for me was that, at the end of a night, two players refused to donate for the food/etc and said, "We think it's up to the winners to donate." That's, of course, BS but we need all these players to keep the game so we went to a rake. It turns out that 5 out of 8 guys play in games with a "10% up to $5" rake so they had no problems!!! And these were the same guys who wouldn't donate lol. Now they end up paying more than the $5 we asked for...