Au pair mileage - what is reasonable?
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Anonymous
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Au pair can use our family vehicle during off hours. Our handbook allows for local driving and notes a 50 mile total for weekend driving (added after pathological liar former au pair put 300+ miles on in a single weekend).
Current au pair is frequently driving 40+ miles per weekday (20+ miles each direction to see friend), plus what I’d call local driving in our area - movies, gym, etc. What is a reasonable limit for off duty car use? This is one of our family vehicles and not an old beater that’s dedicated to au pair. It’s already relatively high mileage, but she is putting on probably three to four times as many miles per week as the total amount of our usual weekly family mileage. Opinions? Recommendations? |
Anonymous
| I think 50 miles per week is fair, have her pay per mile over that.... |
Anonymous
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Sounds like you need to either set something reasonable (100+ miles per week, if you know her friend lives 20 miles away), set up an Uber account and cover $50-100 per week, or you need to provide a metro card IF her friend is metro-accessible. You provided a car as a perk. Severely limiting it now would be immediately met with resentment, justifiable in my mind!
This is one of the things you have to consider BEFORE getting a new AP. You said a previous AP racked up 300+ miles in a weekend, and I agree that’s too much. But 50 miles is not much. If you were limited to 50 miles per week, would you be able to do it without feeling like you’re missing out on other things? |
Anonymous
Let’s see...I didn’t actually have a car for years, and had to figure out ways to get places that didn’t involve me just grabbing the car keys. I also don’t visit my friends who live 20+ miles away on a daily basis. And now, as an adult, I pay for all of the expenses associated with driving, and would not put 50 miles/day on the car for anything other than a necessary work commute. Try the math on that at the fed reimbursement rate: $29 per trip. Let’s multiply by four: $116. Or five: $145. And now let’s take those weekly numbers and multiply by 4.3 (avg weeks per month): that gets us to $499 - $624 per month for au pair’s personal, off duty driving. |
Anonymous
Hi PP, are you OP? It wasn't clear. The AP was promised a vehicle, you weren't. As a more mature adult with a family, of course you aren't visiting friends every day; most people in their 20s (without families) DO spend their evenings with friends. Did she see the handbook before she got to OP's house? Did she actually know how far 50 miles is, since she's most likely used to kilometers? Did she know how spread out the US is compared to Europe, Southeast Asia, and many, many other places in the world? Obviously, she didn't know that her friend would live 20 miles away. All of those contribute to the problem of setting 50 miles as a limit. While you may not put on 50 miles per day for anything other than a commute, others have different priorities, especially young adults. She doesn't have a commute, doesn't know the federal mileage reimbursement rate, and her life revolves around OP's family and getting out of their house for a break. By the way, we don't even know if the mileage is accurate, because OP didn't say that they're using a mileage book or app to track. OP, if you're determined to stick to 50 miles per week, let her know now that EVERYONE who uses the car will be tracking mileage, and walk her through a mileage book or an app. If you decide to go that route, you could end up with major resentment, but that's your choice. Costs add up with APs. Either you make peace with that, you let the next AP know that there are no transportation perks (which makes matching significantly harder), or you get out of the AP program. |
Anonymous
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50 miles really depends on where you live. If you live in Dc or a place like Arlington that may be ok. But that is really only one trip to Tyson’s corner or something.
If you do not live in the city 50 miles is way too low. 100 would be reasonable s And who cares about mileage anymore? Modern cars last forever. Personally- I would never have an ap if we did not have a car for them, just pia for both parties. |
Anonymous
| We just split the gas costs 50/50. Less headache |
Anonymous
| I have to agree with the PP who said "costs add up with APs." Wear and tear on your cars is just one of those costs. I've never considered tracking mileage. I think it would have been viewed very negatively by all of my past au pairs and led to resentment. It seems so micro managing. We make it clear that the car is for "local" use only but aren't more specific than that. We had an au pair a couple of years ago who would visit her first friend from training school multiple times per week which involved a trip half way around the beltway. We were definitely not crazy about that but understood it was important for her to have a social life. As the year went on, she saw that friend less and less and she made friends who lived closer to our house that didn't involve such a long drive. Maybe the same will happen to your AP, OP. |
Anonymous
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Just have a conversation with her. Tell her it's not fair to you to be paying for 100% of the trips for YOUR AP to ALWAYS go visit the friend (wherever they are). They need to meet in the middle or have the friend come to her around 50% of the time. If she does not voluntarily choose to reduce the wear and tear on your car, you will be forced to place limitations on her use.
You might need a tracker, because this might lead to lying and doing it anyway. You also should decide to do something randomly on a weeknight that makes the car "unavailable" for her use because car privileges do not mean she has to go out EVERY SINGLE NIGHT like it sounds she's doing to visit her friend. |
Anonymous
This is so obnoxious. If OP doesn't want AP to have access to the car every night, she needs to make that clear and make a rule about it (which, ideally, would have been disclosed during matching) not play passive aggressive games to make the car unavailable. |
Anonymous
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Having a young adult driver on the road traveling to areas that I would not necessarily frequent at times I wouldn't be out was one of my least favorite parts of hosting. Here is how we handled it:
We had a dedicated AP car which was used for children's activities and personal mileage. We requested that our AP ask first before leaving the county we live in with our vehicle. There were reasonable exceptions to this for day trips, concerts, etc. (On one of these occasions, the AP was in an accident and the car was totaled. It was not her fault and she had asked permission, but it reinforced our geographic "comfort zone.") We calculated the children's activities mileage and reimbursed the AP for that gas only. Most of the driving was for the APs' personal use, so she needed to be mindful of the budget. IF the HF pays all the gas, there is no incentive for the AP to be judicious with mileage. All APs had AP friends within 3-6 miles, which I encouraged by helping her to figure out where other OPs lived. (Some found lifelong friends and continued to see them regularly once they were finished with their AP years.) We asked the AP to limit her personal mileage to approximately 100 miles per week. Our insurance premium was based on mileage per year, as well as the AP's age, so mileage counts for that as well. Because it was a dedicated car and this wasn't a "given" for all APs, this occasionally required we remind the AP that she needed to trade off with other APs rather than be the designated driver every time. With some APs, this was a source of tension, but in fairness the costs and risks of having APs driving should be spread among HFs. In 10+ years of having AP drivers, there were occasional mishaps, the worst being the aforementioned car that got totalled and was promptly replaced, and quite a few breakdowns that required we "rescue" the AP at a time of night when we would normally be in our beds. It was probably good practice for when our children start to drive, but I prefer to minimize unnecessary stress. |
Anonymous
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We allow AP to drive the AP car within a 15 mile radius. Farther than that is only occasional and with permission.
She is also responsible for filling the car with gas. I don't worry about overall wear and tear, because it's an older car. |
Anonymous
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Your limits seem totally fair. But even if they weren't, they were in your handbook and known upfront and it's totally fair to stick to them. You don't necessarily have to put a tracker on the car but you can say that you understand she wants to visit her friend, but said friend lives 40 miles round trip and after the first two trips she'll need to contribute for the gas.
We also had an issue with driving with a previous au pair and so now it's in our handbook that we only allow the car to be driven locally (in Arlington) or very nearby, i.e., Tysons Corner is OK, DC is not. That means she can drive to the gym, to visit local friends, to meetings...but she won't be doing long-distance trips. And she needs to tell us where she's taking the car. She can also walk or drive to the metro and use it if she wants to go farther afield. When we didn't have a car we gave $20/week for Uber. That's 1-2 trips on Uber pool. We're walking distance to bus and metro. When I was young and had no money, that's what I had to do. Adding $100/week in added uber benefits, as pp suggested, is, to me, crazy. |
Anonymous
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Yes your limits are fair. I used to it have limits until I had an au pair that said the only good bar was in Baltimore. The only good church was in Leesburg. All her friends were also in the leesburg area. So sometimes went from Baltimore to ft Detrick after the bar closed. And of course had a boyfriend in frederick. We live in Bethesda
So yes APs I will take advantage of you don’t set rules. |
Anonymous
| I gave my OP a bus and metro pass. $100 per month. |