Do you have a full-time house cleaner / do you know many people who do?

[Anonymous]

We have one full-time employee - nanny/driver/cleaner. It's our only luxury. ( I don't consider private school for our children or a decent house in a high cost of living city to be a luxury. )

[Anonymous]

Um you are definitely the 1% if you have a staff on payroll permanently.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have one full-time employee - nanny/driver/cleaner. It's our only luxury. ( I don't consider private school for our children or a decent house in a high cost of living city to be a luxury. )

lol. tell us what else isn’t a luxury?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have one full-time employee - nanny/driver/cleaner. It's our only luxury. ( I don't consider private school for our children or a decent house in a high cost of living city to be a luxury. )

lol. tell us what else isn’t a luxury?

I'm guessing the Tesla for Dad, Range for Mom, and the Volvo SUV for Nanny are absolute necessities

[Anonymous]

I am the housekeeper. We could afford it occasionally but I don't care. Most people I know have one monthly or twice a month. But, few I know have them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our nanny has stayed past the toddler years and is a full time household manager type. Like today she washed and organized everyones ski clothes, packed them away, re ordered replacements as needed, and also took one kid to a mid day orthodontist appointment. Everyday is different and i trust her to organize her duties as she sees fit, she works 4/5 shorter days or 3 long ones, whatever works for her and us. She cooks maybe 2 nights, does 90 percent of the laundry and cleaning, and also helps maintain our cars (like she took my car one day last week and got oil and filters done). Runs kids around, helps walk dogs, can run stuff to my elderly parents mid day on a whim, etc. It seems excessive but when i say there’s ALWAYS something to do, it rings true. I have 4 kids in 3 schools and 2 districts and DH and I work about 45/50 hours a week. Its a large expense for us (about 78k on a 490 combined salary) but our mortgage is very low (paid down significantly before i went in house) and i dont desire to level up or have nice vacations…not more than i desire the third adult!!! Shes a treasure and i respect and love her immensely.

OP here. Your employee sounds wonderful!

She's replacing parents who aren't home much.

[Anonymous]

Top 1% in US is anything over about $800k HHI. Do you really know multiple people who have full time help but have less than $800k HHI?

i know no one with full time cleaning help.

[Anonymous]

I don't have FT help, but we grew up with a FT housekeeper. She did all the cleaning and laundry, including ironing which was a big thing back then. We also had a landscaping crew and pool guy come once per week. We had an occasional cleaner for our beach house.

We have a weekly cleaner and it's not at all the same. Our house looks good for about a day before the kids undo everything. Growing up, everything was always spotless all the time. It's so civilized and sane to have a perfectly neat house all the time without one thing out of place. I miss it.

[Anonymous]

I used to have a FT housekeeper/nanny. I don’t work and she cooked, cleaned and did our laundry. We live in a 12,000sf house. I would leave a kid or two with her if I didn’t want to drag siblings to school drop off or sports.

I know some working parents with a FT housekeeper. Like me, they often double up as driver or last minute babysitter when they need it.

The FT hiusekeeeors are not like butlers on tv. They are like the pt housecleaners except they know your house more, do your laundry and do tasks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have one full-time employee - nanny/driver/cleaner. It's our only luxury. ( I don't consider private school for our children or a decent house in a high cost of living city to be a luxury. )

this has got to be parody. These people crack me up!

[Anonymous]

I have a roster of tried, tested, quality and reasonably priced service providers, some of them from my own community (Indian American) - cleaners, chefs, caterers, beauticians, event decorators, servers, bartenders, landscapers, handymen, tailors, henna artists, priests, photographers, videographers, party planners, dog sitters, babysitters, tour guides, elder companions, taxi drivers, travel agents, attorneys, sales people, real estate agents etc.

We are DCUM middle class and even though my DH makes a decent amount of money, we are not wealthier because I decided to become a SAHM. I can cut off on expensive indulgences for myself, ie - no beauty parlor, no gym, no designer anything, no expensive car, no expensive house, no expensive private school for kids - but I spend money on outsourcing to the above service providers

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our nanny has stayed past the toddler years and is a full time household manager type. Like today she washed and organized everyones ski clothes, packed them away, re ordered replacements as needed, and also took one kid to a mid day orthodontist appointment. Everyday is different and i trust her to organize her duties as she sees fit, she works 4/5 shorter days or 3 long ones, whatever works for her and us. She cooks maybe 2 nights, does 90 percent of the laundry and cleaning, and also helps maintain our cars (like she took my car one day last week and got oil and filters done). Runs kids around, helps walk dogs, can run stuff to my elderly parents mid day on a whim, etc. It seems excessive but when i say there’s ALWAYS something to do, it rings true. I have 4 kids in 3 schools and 2 districts and DH and I work about 45/50 hours a week. Its a large expense for us (about 78k on a 490 combined salary) but our mortgage is very low (paid down significantly before i went in house) and i dont desire to level up or have nice vacations…not more than i desire the third adult!!! Shes a treasure and i respect and love her immensely.

You can’t have nice vacations on your remaining $400k HHI?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our nanny has stayed past the toddler years and is a full time household manager type. Like today she washed and organized everyones ski clothes, packed them away, re ordered replacements as needed, and also took one kid to a mid day orthodontist appointment. Everyday is different and i trust her to organize her duties as she sees fit, she works 4/5 shorter days or 3 long ones, whatever works for her and us. She cooks maybe 2 nights, does 90 percent of the laundry and cleaning, and also helps maintain our cars (like she took my car one day last week and got oil and filters done). Runs kids around, helps walk dogs, can run stuff to my elderly parents mid day on a whim, etc. It seems excessive but when i say there’s ALWAYS something to do, it rings true. I have 4 kids in 3 schools and 2 districts and DH and I work about 45/50 hours a week. Its a large expense for us (about 78k on a 490 combined salary) but our mortgage is very low (paid down significantly before i went in house) and i dont desire to level up or have nice vacations…not more than i desire the third adult!!! Shes a treasure and i respect and love her immensely.

OP here. I wonder how the math works. The $490k combined salary is gross, I assume. Since the $78k for the household employee is not tax-deductible, you need to actually make about $140k gross in order to cover her salary. If you and your spouse do not earn about the same amount of money but either of you earns less than the other, the net lower salary can be only marginally higher than the gross salary of the household employee.

Personally, if I made only about let's say $50k gross per year more than what is needed to cover the household employee's salary, I would give up my job. Working 45/50 hours per week to net a little bit (in my example around $28k per year) above the amount needed to cover the household employee's weekly at most 30 hours does not seem to be a good deal to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have a roster of tried, tested, quality and reasonably priced service providers, some of them from my own community (Indian American) - cleaners, chefs, caterers, beauticians, event decorators, servers, bartenders, landscapers, handymen, tailors, henna artists, priests, photographers, videographers, party planners, dog sitters, babysitters, tour guides, elder companions, taxi drivers, travel agents, attorneys, sales people, real estate agents etc.

We are DCUM middle class and even though my DH makes a decent amount of money, we are not wealthier because I decided to become a SAHM. I can cut off on expensive indulgences for myself, ie - no beauty parlor, no gym, no designer anything, no expensive car, no expensive house, no expensive private school for kids - but I spend money on outsourcing to the above service providers

All of this is way too excessive for me! I actually enjoy doing some of these things myself and don’t want to outsource every single aspect of my life so I can just hang out with my children (when I feel like it.)

I would prefer to spend that money on a good private school for the kids, buy a nice, comfortable (not huge) house in a good DC neighborhood and have extra money to go to the spa and travel on a regular basis. PP’s life sounds incredibly boring to me, probably just managing the staff all day.

[Anonymous]

When I lived in Miami I knew many people with a full time nanny/housekeeper, often in uniform (nursing kind). They were all pretty wealthy but I'd guess more like 800k/year + than many millions. I never have had that and never will (Not that rich and zero desire to spend the money I have that way!)