I built a calculator for unpaid labour in the house and I want to help people like me.

[AndreaMartina]

DD is 5 months old. Was up at 2am the other week doing that maths you do when you can’t sleep, what would it actually cost to pay someone to do everything I did this week.

Couldn’t find anything that let me work it out properly so I ended up building one myself. Free, nothing to buy, but I did make it so factor that in however you like.

There’s also a tracker for logging household stuff over a week, which is uncomfortably useful if you’ve ever tried explaining the mental load to someone who genuinely can’t see it. And a template for having the actual conversation about splitting things, which is the bit I found much harder. They are free resources.

Let me know if you want to calculate yours and I’ll link the calculator.

But you wouldn’t pay someone to do every task you do in a day so this sort of thing is a moot point.

Is this on a par with the “ I told my husband it would cost him £85000 salary to replace me at home so he should give me this”?

Have you used your template to talk about splitting things?

It's true that paid childcare is very expensive. Most parents know that. Isn't the solution for couples most likely to be about sharing the hard work, rather than monitising it?

These sorts of calculators are always nonsense. You are not a professional anything so couldn’t charge professional fees. At best, these sorts of jobs would be done by a mother’s help kind of position, for 40 hours a week at minimum wage. Anything beyond the 40 hours would be done by the people responsible, in the same way that working people do the tasks required for parenting etc outside of their normal working week. If you feel you’re getting a rough deal in terms of the divisions of labour in the home, maybe you could build a calculator that lists all the jobs and works out what a fair division of those that fall outside the 40 hours of a normal working week would be?

This is a bit bonkers, managing your house or caring for your kids is not unpaid labour, it’s life, how very very odd.

If you’ve an issue with your partner and not happy then address it or leave, but pretending you’re doing unpaid labour and they are saving a fortune is really silly,

You’d also have to deduct Board and Lodging fees from your NMW salary (assuming you don’t contribute anything financially to the pot?) so you wouldn’t be left with much!

Did you actually build this calculator OP or just ask AI to do it?

I never really understand this unpaid labor thing.

we all do it - I am single no kids - I could pay someone to do my cleaning and cooking and garden. Get a taxi everywhere instead of drive. Get painter and decorator, dog walker, laundry service.

My unpaid labor just to run my own life would come to hundreds of pounds a month. But so what?

It is work for someone else and it is not paid, so it is unpaid labour. The concept has been around since the 1970s.

Did you watch Bridget Christie's "The Change" @AndreaMartina? Sounds like the ledgers Linda recorded her chores in.

I don’t get the point of this?
How long did it take you to do?

It’s not work for someone else, it’s her kid and her home, what on earth are you on about,

A more accurate calculator:

40 hours per week at NMW: £500
Minus £50 tax and £20 NI: £430
Minus Board/Lodging/Subsistence at £50/day: £80 per week

£80 per week which you would have to spend on your own needs plus fund half (or proportional?) the costs of the children, so probably around £40 a week for personal spending maybe?

How much did your calculator estimate you were owed?

Do you subtract all the tasks that are just for your own benefit? So cooking your own food, doing your own laundry, making your half of the bed and hoovering your half of the house? What about looking after your half of the children? Do you also record if someone else does something, so if your partner empties the dishwasher do you owe him a pound?

You would get 4 weeks of annual leave though so possibly worth it 😂

But isn't that just life? I don't suppose many people, including very wealthy ones, outsource everything they do. At some point they will choose a gift for a loved one, pick their dirty clothes off the floor, make lunch etc.

We do unpaid labour for children because they aren't able to do it for themselves. If you're doing a lot of it for another adult then you should probably stop.

But isn't cooking, cleaning, looking after a kid etc just...life? It's not unpaid labour it's being alive. Yes, of course there should be an even split of tasks if you're in a couple but the tasks themselves are not a job, they are just what is done in a house.

It is "for someone else" @Backawayfromthesausage if there's another adult in the house who isn't doing it. It's worthwhile to acknowledge the value of the work that a woman is doing.

So these figures essentially represent what it would cost if you disappeared off the face of the earth and your partner decided that he would replace every single thing you do with professionals, rather than do anything extra himself? Is that a scenario worth planning for?

You’ve been posting about this under different guises for weeks. If you’re not happy talk to your partner but you chose to have a baby and take maternity leave, obsessing about putting a financial value on caring for your own baby is unhelpful.

But it’s not, even if not with him she’d have to do these things, it’d called adulting. We all have to clean our homes, cook, shop etc. it’s not like single people don’t care for their kids or hoover.

Everything is so transactional nowadays.

Do you get a rebate for love?

Is this another of these posts advertising someone's new app?

How will your app help anyone?