Nanny share but starting with one baby for several months - best way to set up

[Anonymous]

OP, I believe you are trying to do right by your nanny. Because you are new to this you may not know that blended and averaged rates have been used in abusive ways and any nanny with a lot of experience has a story about being taken advantage of. Mostly it's newer nannies who don't understand the complicated and confusing terms. Even if you arrive at the same number it is best practice to use clear, simple,straightforward wording in your contract.

I charge $17-20 for one child. That is my base pay and overtime is time and a half. If the family wants to guarantee me overtime then great. However, I would not lower my rate so that they could. A newbie nanny can be talked into lowering her rate with the prospect of over time. At some point she realizes that she actually makes less that way, she has to work a lot of overtime hours to make it worth lowering her rates. So the key is to find a nanny whose base rates match whatever your blended rate is so that she takes home what she expected. Does that make sense?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ok, here's the thing PP.

When these employers make a job offer to a candidate, they will offer $17.60/hr as their rate and indicate that OT (1.5) will be paid for all hours beyond 40. Then they'll say how many hours per week they will guarantee. That's it. They won't try to explain the why, they'll simply say what they are willing to pay. They'll make their offer and the nanny can accept the rate (and weekly income) or not. I think the issue is you're looking behind the curtain and would rather not know this is how people work out a budget, but it is. A family decides they can afford $XYZ per month for childcare (or car payments, or their mortgage...) and break that down into what they can afford. Then they offer that. It isn't at all nefarious.

From the nanny perspective, as a nanny myself, I know where you're coming from. You feel that if a nanny is worth $20/hr and the family offers the $17.60 because they couldn't afford her with 10+ hours of OT each week, that it's devaluing the nanny. It is absolutely about the family making an offer they can afford but the nanny is in complete control deciding whether she wants this job or not. If she can find another family she clicks with that can offer her regular $20/hr plus OT of course she'll take that position. As she should. But if she decides this job is worth lowering her hourly rate for, because of the OT or the short commute or the long-term prospects or whatever she cares about, that's nothing to you or me. Please trust us to know what is best for us, and we will assume you know how to get what you want too.

I think this is it right here. To me if the job is worth $20/hour, it rubs me the wrong way that parents lower their hourly rate to afford THEIR overtime. I recognize that this is the best way to arrive at the numbers, but I think it can easily cross the line into deception, especially considering the number of nannies that don't understand the math.

[Anonymous]

When we were in a nanny share we advertised the job at a set salary at set hours (never any OT). One family did not need the nanny for the first two months, so the the family that did paid the nanny's full salary for that period. If childcare had been needed during that period for the child who was still at home with mom, that family would have reimbursed the other family at equivalent to half of the hourly rate, I think, but it didn't come up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok, here's the thing PP.

When these employers make a job offer to a candidate, they will offer $17.60/hr as their rate and indicate that OT (1.5) will be paid for all hours beyond 40. Then they'll say how many hours per week they will guarantee. That's it. They won't try to explain the why, they'll simply say what they are willing to pay. They'll make their offer and the nanny can accept the rate (and weekly income) or not. I think the issue is you're looking behind the curtain and would rather not know this is how people work out a budget, but it is. A family decides they can afford $XYZ per month for childcare (or car payments, or their mortgage...) and break that down into what they can afford. Then they offer that. It isn't at all nefarious.

From the nanny perspective, as a nanny myself, I know where you're coming from. You feel that if a nanny is worth $20/hr and the family offers the $17.60 because they couldn't afford her with 10+ hours of OT each week, that it's devaluing the nanny. It is absolutely about the family making an offer they can afford but the nanny is in complete control deciding whether she wants this job or not. If she can find another family she clicks with that can offer her regular $20/hr plus OT of course she'll take that position. As she should. But if she decides this job is worth lowering her hourly rate for, because of the OT or the short commute or the long-term prospects or whatever she cares about, that's nothing to you or me. Please trust us to know what is best for us, and we will assume you know how to get what you want too.

I think this is it right here. To me if the job is worth $20/hour, it rubs me the wrong way that parents lower their hourly rate to afford THEIR overtime. I recognize that this is the best way to arrive at the numbers, but I think it can easily cross the line into deception, especially considering the number of nannies that don't understand the math.

DECEPTIVE employers are the WORST!
Always trying to get over on the nanny.
Nasty, nasty, nasty.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, I believe you are trying to do right by your nanny. Because you are new to this you may not know that blended and averaged rates have been used in abusive ways and any nanny with a lot of experience has a story about being taken advantage of. Mostly it's newer nannies who don't understand the complicated and confusing terms. Even if you arrive at the same number it is best practice to use clear, simple,straightforward wording in your contract.

I charge $17-20 for one child. That is my base pay and overtime is time and a half. If the family wants to guarantee me overtime then great. However, I would not lower my rate so that they could. A newbie nanny can be talked into lowering her rate with the prospect of over time. At some point she realizes that she actually makes less that way, she has to work a lot of overtime hours to make it worth lowering her rates. So the key is to find a nanny whose base rates match whatever your blended rate is so that she takes home what she expected. Does that make sense?

This is the OP. Thanks for this. The comments are surprising but knowing the history it makes total sense. I will be abundantly clear with the rate we are offering for one child, and the one we are offering for the period of time she is watching two children. I will make clear in the contract. Maybe I can set it up in the payroll system this way and have a custom overtime rate, I haven't gotten that far yet.

[Anonymous]

OP, we use the blended rate because it simplifies the split between the two families, who don't have identical hours. Legally, we are separate employers so OT could be calculated based only on each individual family's hours, but practically/ethically it is one job in our view, so once the nanny shows up, the clock starts ticking for OT regardless of which kids she has at which point. At the end of hour 8, it goes to OT, even though sometimes she has a child (mine!) who has not been there for eight hours yet. So we calculate everything as if one family had two kids the entire time, which is much fairer to our nanny, IMO (bigger paycheck for the many hours she works) and avoids the situation of figuring out if the early or the late hours should count as the OT for the purposes of dividing costs between families. If we did not have a share, I would not bother since it is more complicated and more expensive to do it that way.

But again, we have all of this--including the base rate of $20 and the number of OT hours at $30--in our contract. Luckily our nanny had no issue understanding any of this, and had she ever asked us to just use the straight rates, we'd have happily done so (but given that we pay slightly more overall using the averaged rate, I doubt she would ever ask us to switch back). YMMV depending on your situation, though.