Do you consider "homemaker" to be a job?

[Locke]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Couldn’t those people who spent all day in the house take some time to clean it? If each of them took even half the time they normally spent commuting every day and instead cleaned a sink or pushed a vacuum around, the place would have been spotless.

Its not that easy.

First of all, most of them were either working all day (albeit remotely) or going to school all day, again, remotely.

Some of them were Elderly and quite ill, unable to really move or do that.

Further, it is difficult to ask people to clean spaces that people are currently occupying or otherwise using.

We made do with each person cleaning up after themselves as best they could.

In no way do I want to insinuate that any of these people were bad house-guests in any way. It was a difficult time and everyone had to make accommodations for one another. Myself included.

It just was what it was. It was an unprecedented time and everyone did the best they could.

[Leondros]

Originally Posted by stone hands

This is flawed thinking though. Unless you are taking time off work to clean your house it is absolutely costing you money to get a cleaner instead of doing it yourself. You really cant apply your hourly rate to something completely unrelated to your day job and say your time is worth x, your free time is worth 0$ an hour

You are also using flawed thinking - by going completely in the opposite direction.

High functioning and successful people do pay people to do things like cooking, driving, child care, house cleaning - the reason being they are often working 70, 80, 90 hour weeks. There is simply not enough time in the day. If they reduced their hours, they wouldn't get as high up in an organization and thus they make less.

Similar to some posters in this thread, if you look at a marriage as a team, which at the end of the day any well functioning marriage should be viewed as a partnership where one's success is shared by the other, then a stay at home person dealing with the house in general makes a lot of sense.

Most of my peers and coworkers who are working huge hours are supported by their spouses at home. Picking the kids up, taking them to activities, cleaning, cooking, taxes, house maintenance, bills, etc. are all handled by the stay at home person so the 'bread winner' can bring home hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some of these 'homemakers' if you want to call them that are equally as qualified as their spouses. Lawyers, accountants, some even doctors with huge earnings potential. Some like the life style, some get more utility out of that work than their career, and others have sat down and crunched the numbers and realized having one person going 120% rather than 2 at 80% if going to pay out way more over the long haul.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by dino7c

You realize half your money belongs to your wife right?

Not in any practical sense it doesn't, no.

I have no independent access to her bank accounts, nor her to mine. We have separate accounts and we have one joint account where money gets pooled for (ie: transferred into) to pay for the mortgage, utilities, and other shared expenses. Do we willingly share our incomes between each other? Yeah, of course, we'll sometimes treat the other to dinner instead of making it a joint expense, or buy each other gifts, and so on. I wouldn't have an issue covering an expenditure for her, and vice versa. We're a team, we pool resources to achieve results for the good of the team. But there is no scenario where she could, for example, go to the store and make an unexpected purchase out of my chequing account or on my personal credit card, or go to the bank and make a withdrawal on my behalf. I can't call up her investment firm and give them new investment instructions.

If you mean in the event we were ever to divorce, we have a prenup to deal with all of those details. We were both very onboard with getting such details figured out ahead of time for both of our protection.

What I was saying when I said "I personally pay for x" is that it comes out of my disposable income. She doesn't give me money to cover it.

[Sliver]

Mods: when you're out of thanks are people unable to thank you as well? Just seems like everything I'm saying is very reasonable and sort of a universal opinion in here yet I'm not seeing the support I would have expected.

[Hot_Flatus]

Originally Posted by Weitz

This isn't really an accurate portrayal of this. What is your time worth? My cleaner does in 2 hours what would take me 3 or 4 and I pay them about the same as Sliver.

So me doing that is actually costing me money based on how I value my time.

We have neighbors that do basically nothing (which is fine). No kids, sports/hobbies, or activities and they're home every night. Nice people, but I have to wonder why they would feel that they need a cleaner to come in weekly and clean their house for them. It's also odd that they make repeated mention of not having time to clean the house when this is the type of lifestyle we're dealing with. Just own it and admit you're too lazy or have no desire to clean up the messes you yourself make, but don't equate it to not having time.

In my books having a cleaner is pretty extravagant unless you are adult parents on shift work or very unusual hours that make typical work/home hours accessible. I certainly don't find the 3 hours or so my wife and I would split up throughout the week to clean to be detrimental to anything I would otherwise be doing, and we have young kids in sports and activities of our own on the go.

We do have our robot vacuum on retainer doing the floors 2x week.....so maybe I'm a massive hypocrite on the issue.

[Gondi Stylez]

Originally Posted by Sliver

$350 a month is nothing. Somebody making minimum wage earns that in less than three days. You're not going to keep a 45 year old person out of the workforce so you save $350/month. That doesn't even make sense.

Also, we don't get the cleaner in weekly. It's every second week. We clean on the in between weeks.

But yeah, I know about laundry, groceries, property care, etc. because my wife and I do all those things, too. We do EVERYTHING a homemaker does and waaaaay more.

4200 /yr on 31, 200 /yr GROSS

[The Yen Man]

Originally Posted by Hot_Flatus

We have neighbors that do basically nothing (which is fine). No kids, sports/hobbies, or activities and they're home every night. Nice people, but I have to wonder why they would feel that they need a cleaner to come in weekly and clean their house for them. It's also odd that they make repeated mention of not having time to clean the house when this is the type of lifestyle we're dealing with. Seriously - just own it and admit you're too lazy or have no desire to clean up the messes you yourself make.

In my books having a cleaner is pretty extravagant unless you are adult parents on shift work or very unusual hours that make typical work/home hours accessible. I certainly don't find the 3 hours or so my wife and I would split up throughout the week to clean to be detrimental to anything I would otherwise be doing, and we have young kids in sports and activities of our own on the go.

We do have our robot vacuum on retainer doing the floors 2x week.....so maybe I'm a massive hypocrite on the issue.

Some people just hate cleaning. If they think their time is more valuable doing other things, I say more power to them. Plus, it gives other people paid work, so works out all around IMO. I have friends who hire a cleaner once every two weeks too. I wouldn't say its extravagant, but I wouldn't do it because I'd rather do it myself and spend my money elsewhere that I find more value in.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by Gondi Stylez

4200 /yr on 31, 200 /yr GROSS

You didn't get the point. The point was that's really the only material cost we've added by not having a homemaker in the family. So yeah, she could stay at home and we'd save a whopping $4200/year, or she could work and make several times that.

[woob]

Originally Posted by Sliver

Mods: when you're out of thanks are people unable to thank you as well? Just seems like everything I'm saying is very reasonable and sort of a universal opinion in here yet I'm not seeing the support I would have expected.

Sliver polling high within his own bubble.

[Johnny Makarov]

Originally Posted by you&me

Are you kidding me? I ####ing love Sliver threads.

It's funny, because I think I almost unanimously disagree with every single opinion he holds, yet (I thinK) I'd still enjoy having a beer with him.

Yeah... but what about that Silver guy?

[kevman]

Originally Posted by stone hands

This is flawed thinking though. Unless you are taking time off work to clean your house it is absolutely costing you money to get a cleaner instead of doing it yourself. You really cant apply your hourly rate to something completely unrelated to your day job and say your time is worth x, your free time is worth 0$ an hour

That's funny, I calculate my free time in the exact opposite fashion. The few hours I have at the end of a day after work and getting our daughter to bed are priceless.

Extremes aside, if you really want to assign a value to it, your time after work still has an opportunity cost to it. You could argue that if a house cleaner is $50/hr and an auto mechanic is $130/hr, you're far better off changing your oil and hiring a cleaner than you are scrubbing a toilet and taking your car in.

[The Fisher Account]

The second I'm done paying for daycare, I am hiring a monthly cleaner. Will probably improve my marriage too.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by kevman

That's funny, I calculate my free time in the exact opposite fashion. The few hours I have at the end of a day after work and getting our daughter to bed are priceless.

Extremes aside, if you really want to assign a value to it, your time after work still has an opportunity cost to it. You could argue that if a house cleaner is $50/hr and an auto mechanic is $130/hr, you're far better off changing your oil and hiring a cleaner than you are scrubbing a toilet and taking your car in.

Ya, you really have to ask "is it worth paying $100 so I have time to ..." That could be "go to the movies", "sit on the couch", "go to a hockey game." For some people, it is worth it.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by Leondros

You are also using flawed thinking - by going completely in the opposite direction.

High functioning and successful people do pay people to do things like cooking, driving, child care, house cleaning - the reason being they are often working 70, 80, 90 hour weeks. There is simply not enough time in the day. If they reduced their hours, they wouldn't get as high up in an organization and thus they make less.

Similar to some posters in this thread, if you look at a marriage as a team, which at the end of the day any well functioning marriage should be viewed as a partnership where one's success is shared by the other, then a stay at home person dealing with the house in general makes a lot of sense.

Most of my peers and coworkers who are working huge hours are supported by their spouses at home. Picking the kids up, taking them to activities, cleaning, cooking, taxes, house maintenance, bills, etc. are all handled by the stay at home person so the 'bread winner' can bring home hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some of these 'homemakers' if you want to call them that are equally as qualified as their spouses. Lawyers, accountants, some even doctors with huge earnings potential. Some like the life style, some get more utility out of that work than their career, and others have sat down and crunched the numbers and realized having one person going 120% rather than 2 at 80% if going to pay out way more over the long haul.

At the very top of the pay scale it usually pays for one partner to focus on work while the other handles all non-work family duties, for the reasons you cite. It’s pretty rare for a top executive with a family to have a spouse who works - they need someone to tend the home fires so they can dedicate themselves 100 per cent to their careers.

This is a big reason for the gender disparity in the top echelons of business. It’s far more common for a male executive climbing the org chart to have a partner dedicated to handling all domestic matters.

[Leondros]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

At the very top of the pay scale it usually pays for one partner to focus on work while the other handles all non-work family duties, for the reasons you cite. It’s pretty rare for a top executive with a family to have a spouse who works - they need someone to tend the home fires so they can dedicate themselves 100 per cent to their careers.

This is a big reason for the gender disparity in the top echelons of business. It’s far more common for a male executive climbing the org chart to have a partner dedicated to handling all domestic matters.

Absolutely - although there are some instances of spouses in this city both being in high executive roles. Many of them are second marriages with kids out of the nest.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

This thread is generally pretty good at not labelling the "Homemaker" as being the woman in the family structure.

As someone who's kids go to daycare - I'd say 20% of the kids there have stay at home 'dads' right now. This particular daycare has lots of moms that are senior Partners at law firm or medical professionals. Kind of cool to see the gender roles reversed.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by Hot_Flatus

In my books having a cleaner is pretty extravagant unless you are adult parents on shift work or very unusual hours that make typical work/home hours accessible. I certainly don't find the 3 hours or so my wife and I would split up throughout the week to clean to be detrimental to anything I would otherwise be doing, and we have young kids in sports and activities of our own on the go.

It would just feel really weird to me. Either we would have to regularly leave our own home for several hours at a stretch (and take our dog with us), or I’d have to try to ignore a stranger walking around our house making my bed and wiping my pubes off the toilet while I ate M&Ms and watched Youtube. Which would make me extremely uncomfortable.

It’s like those movies where a lord is being dressed by two or three grooms while carrying on a conversation with an advisor. I always think I’d prefer to just dress myself.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Originally Posted by Hot_Flatus

In my books having a cleaner is pretty extravagant unless you are adult parents on shift work or very unusual hours that make typical work/home hours accessible. I certainly don't find the 3 hours or so my wife and I would split up throughout the week to clean to be detrimental to anything I would otherwise be doing, and we have young kids in sports and activities of our own on the go.

I'll disagree with this - my wife and I both work 8-5 (and then some), which leaves us with the weekends for "free time" - lets say that's 8 hours for Saturday and Sunday - for a total of 16 hours.

If I can recover ~20% of my free time by paying for a cleaner - that's an easy call for me.

Besides, my definition of "clean" and those of my wife differ greatly. My efforts to 'clean' are considered substandard - so this defuses that marital grenade...

[chedder]

I think there are real and tangible benefits with the stay at home parent route while kids are young (before grade 1) if you can swing it. That's what we were able to do and it worked really well. And I do believe it's a job in that circumstance.

Now with older kids I couldn't imagine my spouse being home full time. She works half to three quarter time in healthcare and that's busy and draining enough for her and us with busy teenagers. We don't have a house cleaner but the thought has crossed our minds.

Funny on this thread people talking about the extravagance of a $4200/year cleaner and on the watch thread guys are buying multiple $75,000 watches.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by I-Hate-Hulse

I'll disagree with this - my wife and I both work 8-5 (and then some), which leaves us with the weekends for "free time" - lets say that's 8 hours for Saturday and Sunday - for a total of 16 hours.

If I can recover ~20% of my free time by paying for a cleaner - that's an easy call for me.

Besides, my definition of "clean" and those of my wife differ greatly. My efforts to 'clean' are considered substandard - so this defuses that marital grenade...

Pretty good standards in my opinion. I'm more or less the same.

I'll pay to have it done.

"And thats how the fight never started and so we drank wine, ate pizza and watched a movie with the kids instead...."

The horror....the horror....