Do you pay for your AP's personal gas?

[Anonymous]

My au pair told me that all her friends' host parents pay for their personal gas useage no matter where they go. We pay for our AP's gas for the kids trips obviously and for any short trips to the store or her friends that live close by or whatever. But we don't pay for her personal gas when she goes further than a mile or so. What do you do in your family?

[Anonymous]

My APs haven't had a car or access to one. I am currently looking into getting one and have considered the gas issue. I will provide a weekly stipend that will be enough to cover DCs activities then an additional $10-15 to cover any extra trips I don't plan for (so probably $40 weekly as my DCs only attend 2 days of preschool and everything else is walkable if the weather is nice). After that, she is on her own. I'm not going to get pulled into the 'keeping up with everyone else' race. I was very upfront about the car usage before matching. For me, it is financial, although I do not intend to tell AP that.

[Anonymous]

No OP you're not required to pay for her gas when she is out and about doing her own thing. You pay for her room and board and she gets her pocket change to do as she pleases. The whole "But other Hosts Parents do it" is soo juvinile and irrelevant. I'd tell her to kick rocks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No OP you're not required to pay for her gas when she is out and about doing her own thing. You pay for her room and board and she gets her pocket change to do as she pleases. The whole "But other Hosts Parents do it" is soo juvinile and irrelevant. I'd tell her to kick rocks.

Thanks. This is the OP. This was my initial reaction to it. We live right by the Metro and use it daily ourselves, and she knew our deal when we were very clear on how our family car operated when we matched. Although I'm definitely going to be more clear on this next year. Our current AP is very small-minded - she definitely hasn't grasped the concept that just because this is the way she's experienced (in her country, in her town, with her family, whatever) it doesn't mean that's how everyone does it. She's also always complaining about things in the US as compared to her country. I think this comment might have been one of these types of things.

[Anonymous]

Also, we knew of one AP where the HF did pay for all gas use and she drove all over town, abusing the generosity. The HF then stopped providing this benefit and all APs got together complaining about the evil HF.
This has taught me to not put too much stock into the APs complaining because they never tell you the whole story.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also, we knew of one AP where the HF did pay for all gas use and she drove all over town, abusing the generosity. The HF then stopped providing this benefit and all APs got together complaining about the evil HF.
This has taught me to not put too much stock into the APs complaining because they never tell you the whole story.

This is the other thing - there are pros and cons to every family. Our AP's friend whose host family has an AP car and pays for all gas also has three kids, uses every single hour every single week, has a (in my opinion) very restrictve curfew and friend policy, etc. Good things and bad things about every situation, but they never seem to look at the balance, rather only the bad things.

[Anonymous]

Nope.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No OP you're not required to pay for her gas when she is out and about doing her own thing. You pay for her room and board and she gets her pocket change to do as she pleases. The whole "But other Hosts Parents do it" is soo juvinile and irrelevant. I'd tell her to kick rocks.

Thanks. This is the OP. This was my initial reaction to it. We live right by the Metro and use it daily ourselves, and she knew our deal when we were very clear on how our family car operated when we matched. Although I'm definitely going to be more clear on this next year. Our current AP is very small-minded - she definitely hasn't grasped the concept that just because this is the way she's experienced (in her country, in her town, with her family, whatever) it doesn't mean that's how everyone does it. She's also always complaining about things in the US as compared to her country. I think this comment might have been one of these types of things.

Can't comment on the gas issue since we don't provide a car for our AP. As a parallel, we provide metro money for the AP to take the kids places, to go to her classes, and to go to cluster meetings, but we don't provide extra metro money for personal use.

On the complaining about things in the US as compared to her own country - we have experienced this to some extent with most of our APs; I brush it off as a symptom of home-sickness.

[Anonymous]

We let our AP put all gas on our credit card, but we keep track of the miles she puts on her car each month. If it starts to get excessive, we address it.

[Anonymous]

Yes, we pay for personal gas. Mainly because it seems too much of a pain to calculate it out. We also pay for iphone. These are 2 "perks" of our family.

We do not pay for personal toiletries, though (this was on an earlier thread). We also do not go out of our way to purchase special food items for AP or give her a food allowance. She joins us at meals and eats what we eat. She is welcome to eat whatever is in the house for lunch (and there is plenty of food in the house).

[Anonymous]

Similar to PP, we pay for all the gas our AP uses and don't try to sort out which is work and which is personal. Our APs main job responsibility is driving our tweens around, so it would just be a pain to try to figure out and seems petty to ding her for. When she drives on an out of town trip (yes we have let our APs do that once they have proven themselves), we do ask them to pay or treat it as a "present" from us to them. This is a perk of working for our family.

[Anonymous]

Op again. Good point PPs - she has two friends that she says have free use of a car with gas paid for. One has older kids and is mainly a driver. The other has elementary aged kids that all go to a private school 30 minutes away every day (so she drives two hours every day).

In contrast, driving is not a requirement of our job. She does drive the kids ocassionally but we mostly offer the car use as a perk.

She's made a couple other swipes at it, so I may be tempted to address it soon.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes, we pay for personal gas. Mainly because it seems too much of a pain to calculate it out. We also pay for iphone. These are 2 "perks" of our family.

We do not pay for personal toiletries, though (this was on an earlier thread). We also do not go out of our way to purchase special food items for AP or give her a food allowance. She joins us at meals and eats what we eat. She is welcome to eat whatever is in the house for lunch (and there is plenty of food in the house).

Sort of like how we do it. Our "policy" is that she pays for her own gas, but in reality, we don't enforce it. We own two cars, and one car she always uses for "work" and the other she uses for her personal things. Both are shared cars, though neither gets used often because we use metro to commute (and walk to get there). In 9 months, I think she has filled the tank twice. We have filled it all the other times, so we have mostly paid the gas. She hasn't abused it, so we don't worry about it much. If she were driving really often or long distances, I would probably feel she needed to pay more.

We also provide an iphone but not really any special household items or foods or food allowance.

[Anonymous]

OP again. We also give ours an iPhone. And we don't have a food allowance (she adds things she wants to our grocery list and is free to eat anything in the house).

[Anonymous]

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