Hellobee

Last fall, I started a series of posts about how our family has navigated childcare. In Part 1, I outlined about how our family figured out childcare when we only had 1 infant. And, in Part 2, I wrote about how our family switched our childcare care approach when we added a 2nd baby and decided to hire a nanny. It took me a few months (4 to be exact), but I’m finally resuming this series with a deeper dive into hiring a nanny.

I didn’t know it when I started this series back in October, but this discussion is very timely for my little family as we just found out we’re losing our beloved nanny who’s been with us for the past 2 1/2 years! We are of course so sad and more than a little stressed to be losing her, but our family’s needs have changed (as they are prone to do) so this is actually a good time for us to re-evaluate the best childcare solution for us.

But first, let’s talk about how to hire a nanny. We’ve had great success using Care.com to post ads and communicate with potential providers. We found our current nanny that way, and we actually also found the wonderful SAHM who watched our first son that way too (more about that in Part 1 if you’re interested). We are tentatively planning to use Care.com again to find a new nanny (assuming we go down that path). There are, of course, many other ways to find a nanny – using an agency, posting on neighborhood or community message boards and Facebook groups, word of mouth, referrals, poaching from your daycare, etc. My general, relatively unhelpful advice is to use any/ all medium(s) you can manage and feel comfortable with. Your end goal is to find the right nanny for your family and to do that may require you to sift through a lot of noise, but it’s worth it when you find the right fit for your family (and equally important is that the nanny finds the right family for her).

It is vitally important, however, that you know ahead of time what you are comfortable with and capable of paying, and you clearly communicate that to candidates at all steps in the process, along with any other hard requirements you have whether that’s first aid/ CPR certification, clean driving record, availability, or something else. I’ve found that many candidates on Care.com mass apply to jobs without actually reading through the requirements, and the only way to mitigate that is to be very clear from the start about what the job requires. When we lived in Colorado, we looked into hiring a nanny and advertised a pay range of $10.00-15.00/hour – most candidates who replied to our ad listed their minimum hourly rate as $20.00. While I truly believe nannies deserve to be paid a fair wage, we simply could not afford $20.00 an hour for 50 hours a week (if you’re doing the math, that’s $1,000.00 per week BEFORE nanny taxes).

As for the actual interview and hiring process, I have to admit I’m not very rigorous – of course you should do your diligence and conduct interviews, check references, do a background check, etc. But ultimately I trust my gut with childcare decisions. As for pay, thankfully when we moved to the Midwest, we realized that nannies are more affordable here than in Colorado, although it is still a huge line item in our budget. These is a list of our “requirements” if you’re interested (well I suppose they are since we’re unexpectedly back in the nanny hiring game!):

• $12.00-$15.00/hr depending on experience
• Comfortable with pets
• Able and willing to drive kids to preschool and activities
• Willing to do light housekeeping when time permits (mainly picking up during day and meal preparation)
• Available from 8 AM to 6 PM, Monday through Friday
• Enjoys playing and being outside with loud, occasionally rowdy little boys

And that’s about it.

In my perfect world, I’d love to find a nanny who keeps screens off, cooks delicious meals, folds laundry, keeps things neat and tidy, does art projects, builds forts, loves imaginative and hands-on play, enforces limits in a loving way, etc., but I also try to be realistic. I don’t do all those things, all of the time (or any of those things, sometimes). I’m hiring a nanny to take care of my kids – not to be a robot – and I do not expect or want the person I hire to be perfect. At the end of the day, I want somebody who is reliable and who loves my kids (or at least really likes them) and takes good care of them. Thankfully our current nanny excels at all of that, even with 3 loud and rowdy little boys to take care of!

As for actually hiring and paying a nanny, well that’s a little complicated and will require you to do a bit of research or hire an accountant or a 3rd party service provider to help you (Care.com does provide some of those services through its Homepay product, which we do not use now but will likely try out with our new nanny). Here is a very basic outline of some of the rules you need to be aware of when hiring a nanny, caveated of course with the disclaimer that I am not an accountant or an employment attorney:

• When you hire a nanny that works in your home, your nanny is your employee and as such you have to follow various employment and tax laws.
• You will need your nanny to give you her SSN for tax purposes. Legally you’re also required to have your nanny complete a Form I-9 with proper identification (that’s the “am I legal to work in the USA?” form). You may even be technically required to display certain employment paperwork in your home.
• You usually have to pay your nanny overtime (1.5 x her normal hourly rate) for any hours worked over 40 during a week.
• You have to give your nanny a W-2 every year by January 31st.
• You have to pay various “nanny taxes” – in our case, we pay state unemployment taxes, federal unemployment taxes, and federal Medicare and Social Security taxes. We are not required to withhold state or federal income taxes but could choose to do so (and by not doing so we have to maintain an open line of communication with our nanny to ensure she’s properly accounting for her own tax liability). We also have to decide whether to withhold the employee portion of the federal Medicare and Social Security taxes (currently 7.65% of gross pay) from our nanny’s paycheck each week or to pay that amount on her behalf. We choose to pay those amounts on her behalf so we pay both the employer and the employee portions, which adds up to 15.3% of her gross pay. To make things even more complicated, the employee portion we pay on her behalf is taxable income for income tax purposes, so we have to properly account for that on her W-2.

Below is a very rough sketch of what that actually looks like and means from a monetary perspective. Let’s say you hire a nanny to work for you for 50 hours a week at $12.00/hour. Here is what you’re actually paying per week to employ her:

Regular pay: $12.00/ hour x 40 hours = $480.00

Overtime pay: $18.00/hour x 10 hours = $180.00

State unemployment tax at 1% of gross pay: $6.60

Federal unemployment tax: (this really depends on what state you live in and is extremely complicated so I’m not including a number here – in our case it’s a pretty minimal amount because we pay our state unemployment taxes)

Federal Social Security and Medicare taxes – employer portion at 7.65% of gross pay: $50.49

Federal Social Security and Medicare taxes – employee portion at 7.65% of gross pay: $50.49

Gross Pay: $660.00

Additional Taxes: $107.58

Total “Cost” to You: $767.58 (which for us divides out to $255.86 per child if you’re comparing to daycare costs)

We also have our 2 older boys enrolled in a preschool, which adds about $60.00 per week to our childcare costs. This increases the total “cost” in the above example to $832.58 (which for us divides out to $277.53 per child).

In addition to all the rules and taxes, you also need to think about things like:

• Work schedule, vacation time, and sick days: Do you want or need a set work schedule? What happens if you’re running late or she needs to leave early? Do you pay your nanny when she takes time off? What if she’s sick or asks for part of a day off to go to an appointment? Do you pay your nanny when you take vacation or have a holiday and don’t need her? People handle this in many, many different ways – right now we have a set schedule and we pay her a “flat” rate for the week based on that schedule unless she takes more than 2 hours off or we use her for more than our set number of hours. We do not pay for any sick days or vacation time, although we have thought about doing that. We also do our very best to accommodate any requests she has to take time off – this is really hard sometimes, but we feel like it’s an important part of our job as her employer. It has been stressful, however, to cover childcare when our nanny is sick or needs time off for whatever reason – that is definitely one benefit of daycare (although my kids would likely get sick more often if they went to daycare, which would also require us to cover childcare).
• Bonuses and pay raises: Are you going to re-evaluate your nanny’s hourly rate each year or more frequently than that? What if you add another baby to the family? Are you going to pay a year end or holiday bonus? What about birthday gifts and other holidays? You also have to keep in mind that as your employee any extra compensation or benefits may be taxable (both to you and her). Again people handle these things in different ways – we usually give our nanny a birthday gift, include her in our less formal holiday celebrations, and give her a year-end cash bonus/ gift (usually equivalent to about 1 week’s pay). We’ve also raised her pay each year and when we added a new baby to the family – usually those raises were about $1.00 per hour. Over the course of her employment with us, her pay has been raised a total of $2.50/ hour, which doesn’t sound like a lot but adds up to an additional $137.50 / week (at 50 hours per week before taxes).
• Car/ gas and other expenses: If your nanny is going to be driving your kids at all, that introduces a whole new set of issues. Whose car is she going to drive? Who is providing and installing the car seats? Who pays for gas? What if she takes our kids to the zoo or the pool or to Chick-Fil-A for lunch? Setting clear expectations and maintaining open lines of communications about those things is really, really hard and probably the thing I struggle with the most with having a nanny. We’ve circled through various solutions and landed on this – our nanny drives our car and we cover gas/ insurance for that car, as well as keeping it clean and having the correct car seats installed. If our nanny wants to take the kids to do an activity or out to eat, we reimburse her for that or provide her with cash if we know about the activity in advance. We also maintain memberships at the local zoo, science center, and YMCA, so they have a variety of activities available to them for “free”.
• Food and wear & tear: Two things I grossly underestimated (or just didn’t take into consideration) when hiring a nanny is how much food we’d have to buy and keep stocked every week and how much extra wear and tear our house would take having our kids home everyday. I’m sure all the SAHMs out there who are still reading this long post (thank you!) are rolling their eyes (hopefully in a kind, gentle way), but as a mom who has always worked out of the home I was pretty clueless on this front. People need to eat – your nanny included. Also kids are hard on, well, everything, so if they’re at home jumping off the walls 24 hours/ day vs. 12 hours/ day, you’re going to notice a big difference in how dirty your walls get.
• Household chores and day to day stuff: This is kind of a catch all because there really is a lot of day to day stuff to think about when you hire somebody to spend 40+ hours a week in your house taking care of your kids. Things like – will your nanny try to follow your schedule and routines with your kids or set her own (we lean toward letting her do what’s best for her). Do you expect your nanny to do the dishes? Feed the kids dinner? Give them baths? Put away laundry? Do the laundry? Run errands? Let your dogs out? There is a lot to think about, and if you have specific expectations or asks it’s always best to communicate those clearly (and hopefully kindly). Our approach to this kind of stuff is pretty flexible, but over time we’ve developed a good cadence – our nanny usually puts away our boys’ laundry, fixes them lunch, snacks, and occasionally breakfast (but rarely dinner), gives them baths when it works out schedule wise, lets our dogs out when she can, and does other light housekeeping (primarily dishes) as her schedule permits.
• Preschool: Do you want your kids to attend preschool or other organized activities like music class? They would get this type of activity at daycare as part of their tuition, but obviously you have to pay extra and manage the logistics if you have a nanny. We are lucky to live in an area where there are good, affordable preschool options and have been able to enroll our boys in preschool starting when they’re 2. It is, however, another thing we have to pay for and manage.

I’m not going to lie – all of this is a LOT to keep track of, think about, and manage, and there have been many times when I’ve asked myself if having a nanny is really worth it (especially at the end of each calendar quarter when I have to file and pay our various taxes). Sometimes it just seems easier to have another place to take my kids – preferably a place where they feed them and teach them their ABCs.

And this is where I’m at mentally with that line of questioning – for our family right now, it’s worth it to have a nanny as long as I continue to work full time. I like having my kids, especially when they’re very little, at home with one person who really knows and loves them and feels like a member of our family. I like that they do art projects and build forts in the afternoons, go on nature walks, and rarely get sick every week (miraculously my oldest son has NEVER had an ear infection!) I very much appreciate not having to do drop off and pick up every day and having flexibility when I get stuck at work or need to take the kids to an early appointment. I also like having a person I know and trust who can babysit for date nights (although we rarely do that). The intangibles are and remain worth it to us.

That said, as our family has grown and our needs have changed, I’m less and less sure that the the overall burden of managing and paying for childcare at all is worth it for us right now. More on that in Part 4 (which will hopefully take me less than 4 months to write!)

I hope this post was helpful to anybody considering hiring a nanny! I would love to hear your experiences as obviously this, despite being an extremely lengthy post, really just skimmed the surface of everything that’s involved with having a nanny.