Would You Hire a Housekeeper or Household Manager?

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I read an absolutely fabulous article recently on Medium from a self-made millionaire and Australian working mom who hired a housekeeper and household manager for her family. In fact, Denise Duffield-Thomas said hiring a housekeeper was the “gamechanger” for her. Here is her summary:

We hire a housekeeper from 7 am – 12 every weekday to basically be my wife.

She makes breakfast, light tidying, preps lunch and dinner, and then does the million and one things that run a house. Food shopping, laundry, calling the handyman, going to the post-office, replacing batteries and toilet paper, remembering to buy milk, etc.

Think of everything you mentally hold in your “to-do” list, and she does it.

We’ve talked about how to level up your childcare game when time, not money, is the issue, but not in the detail that she goes into here. I don’t know her personally, but she’s in one of my business Facebook groups, and I’d bet her Medium posting was based on a comment thread that she chimed in on.

house ad reads "OUR TOP TIPS FOR WINTER BUSINESS CASUAL"; background image shows a young professional woman wearing winter business casual and walking in a snowy city

She shared her entire job description in the group, which included planning and cooking meals, cleaning kitchen from the night before, removing old items from the fridge, organizing closets, tidying the house, errands like shopping, returns, taking items to the charity shop, going to the post office, filing paperwork, making appointments, and more. I’m so happy she published her thoughts for broader consumption; it was a great piece and I highly encourage you to read it.

I also have one Facebook friend (whom I know primarily through a blogging connection) who hired a stay-at-home mom whose kids were in school to come over for a few hours a week and “fold laundry,” which I could imagine being the same kind of job. I also know it was pretty common among senior women lawyers at my old New York law firm to keep their nanny on even after the kids were in school to do these kinds of duties.

{update: I tried to use a virtual assistant to delegate family tasks — here’s how it went}

Let’s discuss, ladies — what do you think of housekeepers for working moms? Do you think a household manager is a good use of money if you have two working parents, and where does it rank among other expenses?

1) If you HAVE hired a housekeeper (or, say, kept on an old nanny now that your children are grown and this is the role she serves), some questions for you:

  • How did you find this person?
  • How much do you pay per hour?
  • What is the person’s title — housekeeper, personal assistant, or something else?
  • How long has this person worked for you?
  • What kinds of things do you always delegate? What do you prefer to do yourself?
  • What are the non-cleaning things your housekeeper does, an how much of those are kid-related?
  • Do you feel like you can trust the person to do urgent/important things?

2) If you have NOT hired someone like this but in theory could afford this kind of help, what’s holding you back? To me the biggest things are a) navigating the etiquette of the arrangement if you’re hiring someone you know (like, say, a stay-at-home mom you met through your kids’ school), and b) bringing someone you don’t know into your home to do this stuff — from a safety perspective, from a “I want to be the only one who puts away my underwear” perspective, and from a “who knew I had such strong feelings about X?” perspective.

For example, I’ve had cleaning services “unload the dishwasher” by sticking big knives blade-up into the big canisters with spatulas… so I feel like there would be a huge learning curve to make sure that things were done “my way” and that said learning curve would involve a TON of my own time, including making lists of what I want the person to do and making sure I have “enough” for him or her to do.

Ladies, I’d love to hear your thoughts — have you hired a housekeeper? Does your current nanny already do these duties, or when you hired for childcare did you make it part of the job description? If you haven’t, what’s holding you back? 

Would You Hire a Housekeeper or Household Manager?

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Does anyone follow Nicole Walters on IG? She talks about this a lot and has a household manager. She specifically says, “He works for ME. Not my kids.”

I loved that quote- meaning her children still contribute and do household tasks/chores/cleaning.

My son will age out of after-school care after 6th grade in our area. I don’t think I’m 100% comfortable having him get off the bus, get in the front door, and wait at home alone for us at age 12. My solution is to hire someone to be primarily a housekeeper in the afternoons, but who can also be an adult who is in my home to notice if he does not make it back at the expected time. In my dreams, they handle a lot of the tasks mentioned above, such as:
-unloading/loading the dishwasher
-Changing sheets/towels and washing/drying them
-Cleaning the bathrooms
-Getting my son a snack after school

I have had a personal assistant who worked 5-10 hours/week. I started at $13-15hour. I live in a very small city. I found my PA by having a grad student friend post on the grad student classified board at the local university. I also had a cleaning service every other week. My personal assistant did things like:
* baked healthy snacks (muffins);
* made or prepped dinner entrees;
* dropped off dry cleaning and postal packages;
* researched household things like decor/furnishings, house cleaners, etc.;
* prepared craft projects for my kid;
* organized kid birthday party invites;
* hand wash/iron;
* watered gardens

I found a “how to hire your first employee” check list, and paid her on the books. I hired a payroll service. I loved my personal assistant but she switched her regular job and had to quit after a few months. I work part-time and have only 1 kid. Husband travels a lot.

I think more working moms would have personal assistants/household managers if there wasn’t a stigma. You can’t duplicate yourself, but it helped me a lot to be able to push tasks that were making me feel overwhelmed to a competent person. We used a notebook to communicate to each other. I gave her a pre-paid credit card to pick up dry cleaning, buy craft supplies etc.

Our Au Pair is fulfilling some of these roles. He walks the big kids to school and then has a two year old all day who sleeps for two or three hours. During that time, he does small, easy tasks like wiping down the kitchen, emptying dishwasher, doing breakfast dishes, running the steamer over the main floors, cleaning his shared bathroom, chopping or prepping a few veg or making rice for supper in the IP. He takes care of for kid related deritus of the day. So I get, what feels like, a big break on a few tasks that add up during the week and the house is tidy and I get a jump on supper. He will also do random things like take the garbage out and shovel. He makes great money and has the time, works for everyone.

I would love to hire someone to do the boring repetitive tasks that require little instruction or supervision: cleaning, laundry, yard care, chauffeuring kids. But I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to delegate more complex household management tasks such as shopping, meal planning, signing kids up for camp, paying bills, tax preparation, etc. I spend all day delegating and supervising at work and I hate it. I don’t want to spend my personal time delegating and supervising when it would be faster and easier just to do the tasks myself.

I know that this might not be a popular comment, but the thing that has always bothered me about hiring out this sort of non-professional help (I’m calling it that to differentiate it from hiring people who have some sort of specific expertise/ability that I don’t have) is that I feel like it would give the kids the impression that there are certain things that we don’t do, that is the role of “other people” (particularly people of a lower social class). I know that a lot of people do it, and there are probably other ways to work against instilling that idea, and I’m not really absolute about it (i.e., though we do our own yard work, it wouldn’t bother me a lot if we paid someone to mow, for reasons I can’t really put my finger on), but every now and then, you hear some idiot say something like “well, who’s going to clean your toilets?” as if that’s not something that they’ve ever contemplated doing before, and that really bothers me.

We sort of have this through a combination of people? We have a cleaning person, who has been with us for ten years and comes weekly. An elderly family member folds our laundry each week and does all our ironing (it takes her about 3 hours – I wash and dry the stuff that I don’t care if it’s wrinkled ahead of time, like kids clothes and sheets, so she just folds). Everyone puts away their own clothes. Our nanny comes an hour and a half early each day and does light cleaning (empty dishwasher, wipe down counters, sweep). I also have her run errands (I gave her a business credit card, which doesn’t show up on her credit report) – go to the grocery store, return items, go to the post office etc. I don’t have her do all the shopping, mostly because we are picky about produce and meat and she isn’t. I do give her very specific instructions (like pictures of the exact item I want). I also preorder things at places like Target and have her pick it up. It means I can have her run to all the stores I want during the week (e.g., Safeway for our favorite ice cream and Trader Joe’s for yogurt), and on the weekend I just go to our local grocery store with the nice produce. (Also, my entitled kids like fresh bread, so she buys a lot of midweek bread.) We go through an agency and pay on the books, and it costs a lot, but honestly, I couldn’t find anyone to just cover childcare anyway (I need about 4 hours/day), so this makes the shift a more reasonable 5-6 hours). There is nothing I find more depressing than looking at the dishwasher waiting to be emptied when she’s gone :). We are in the Bay Area.

I would absolutely love to hire a house manager/housekeeper, but it’s not in our budget now. If I made around $50,000 more (possible in the future), I would do this. I do think it would be awkward at first navigating how I want things done, and just asking someone to do things like refill my toilet paper roll, but once you got a rhythm, I think it would be amazing. And, I’m not that picky about how I want things–given how little time I have to do things, “done” is basically how I want things.

I might have been able to stay in biglaw with this kind of household help.

We wanted someone who could cover childcare as needed, but if childcare wasn’t needed, do housework (laundry, meal prep, errands, etc). We didn’t get very far in the process, but it seemed close to impossible to get someone willing and able to do both well in our area (Silicon Valley). From what I’ve seen, local wages are a typically quite high for this kind of position—much more than you’d pay someone with a good liberal arts degree in an early career job. We needed to pay on the books; I’m not sure of market for off the books help.

4 yo and 1 yo in daycare, i’m in biglaw, we have a housekeeper 4 mornings a week. she does dishes, laundry (including folding and putting away), takes out trash, puts cans to the curb on garbage day, refills TP, breaks down amazon boxes, unpacks our suitcases, as well as the normal housecleaning work. we pay $20/hour (HCOL area) and have her on the books, about $25/hour. she does not do a lot of childcare but will entertain the baby while i get dressed, help us out to the car etc. she’s worked for us for 5 years, with increasing frequency so she knows where everything goes. she is great, comes up with systems for things as she feels necessary. she is much more careful about laundry (i.e. line drying) than i am. occasionally she mixes up the kids clothes and she doesnt fully understand where i want the toys to go (for a while kept treating the dollhouse as shelves to hold toys) but that’s better than me doing it myself!

i’d like to give her a big target gift card and have her shop for household things for us but my dh thinks that’s too fancy for us. which means it is now his job (used to be mine). her english is not great so i would not have her do other tasks (i.e. go to post office) both because it would be hard for her and it’s hard for me to explain things to her (my husband communicates more with her in their shared native language). we had a goal for her to teach kids that language but that is not working out.

“We hire a housekeeper from 7 am – 12 every weekday to basically be my wife.” While I’m sure this comment was in jest, the awfulness of “basically be my wife” prevents me from taking anything this woman says seriously. It is horribly offensive to both men and women.