To ask, if you have a full time nanny, how much is your household income?

[coffeeforone]

Just that really. Currently PG with DC2. DC1 goes to nursery full time, and thinking of the best way to afford full time childcare for two little ones once I'm back to work. I'm interested in the income levels of those who can afford nannies and whether it is completely out of the question for us, and at what income level families can generally afford a nanny?

They're usually completely unqualified teens. My neighbour's au pairs were all in their mid-twenties, they didn't improve with age!

An au pair isn't an alternative to a nanny. An au pair is for wrap around care and helping when the kids are sick. I've had 3 au pairs. None knew how to cook, they all stick the tv on and play on their phone so as long as you are ok with that and the care they do is limited then it will work for you. I've always had au pairs in their mid 20s.

I have an au pair and my son is at nursery 5 days per week 9am - 4pm plus the other son is at school 8.45am - 3.30pm. The au pair is great wrap around care for both of them.

blueshoes Au pairs here in the US have government mandated wages and a visa that must be purchased. The visa alone is $10k. It's done to help protect the local job market.

I would never have an au pair for pre school age children. They need someone qualified and experienced. Once they are in school an au pair is an option on the table for me. I would not want to hire someone random and we regularly have employees from DHs employers HQ asking if we can take on their DC as an au pair. I think this would help us be luckier.

Our nanny (South East) is on £11 net per hour which costs about £35k per year for a 44 hour week. Dh earns about £120k working ft and I earn about £95k for a 4 day week.

maybe consider an au pair if you have room

Why do people say this?!

An au pair is not a viable alternative to a qualified full time child carer, in whichever setting that may be.

Au Pairs are usually young women who wish to travel and learn a second language, and part of that is living with a family and helping out in return for pocket money. This may mean minding the kids for a couple of hours a day after school or doing some (SOME, not all!) housework. They will expect language lessons, to be treated as a daughter or neice, a member of the family, not paid staff.

The reason you find so many people saying au pairs are not working out is because they expect qualified nanny care from an unqualified young woman for £100 a week. Doesnt take a genius to work out why this invariably goes wrong.

~£330k gross income with fairly low outgoings. School fees included as part of DH's benefits package. We're mortgage free. Nice but not new cars. I cycle or motorcycle 90% of my journeys.

We have a holiday home (very small) which we own and makes a small return every year so don't even spend a lot on that.

@sportyfool

Are you talking about a childminder's total income from all their charges or for what each family pays them?

We expect our nanny (probably the wrong job description) to do housework and other things when the children are at school. She cooks and cleans (we also have a 3 times weekly cleaner), organises online grocery delivery, does the laundry (not ironing), does the school run etc. She works 40 hours a week. Babysitting on a Sat evening, usually once a fortnight, is overtime cash in hand. Last year she got 12 weeks paid holiday. in addition to Bank Holidays.

We pay a little more than that £33k mentioned but she earns it.

I don't know , it just seems like a lot . I've never used either as in a sahm . Dh is a high earner but I wasn't particularly so it didn't make sense to even explore it .
I mean it's great that's it's paid well . I just didn't realise .

@sportyfool

It’s not that well paid when you consider the hours - it’s usually based on an hourly rate, for typically 10-12 hour days.

£11 - £13 per hour is reasonable money but not immense for the nanny but of course does add up for the parents.

OP - we had two nannies with their own children so it worked out a little cheaper .

Don’t forget to add in pension payments, Nanny payroll costs, car insurance etc.

The killer is that as a parent you pay it out of your already taxed income, rather than getting tax relief on it. Sick pay is no longer refunded so you could be on the hook for 6 months of SSP plus having to pay for alternative childcare, and they even included nanny employers from the NI exemption for small businesses.

Thanks all, some interesting feedback. I wouldn’t want an au pair or a live in nanny. It’s between nursery and live out nanny, cost approx the same for 2 by the looks of it, with hidden extras for nanny.

Our joint income isn’t small but no where near some of the incomes quoted. £125-£130k pa, so maybe we need to stick with the more certain nursery costs.

If it's much of a muchness cost wise, I would go with the nanny. Not having to get two children out of the house in the morning, not having to race back or try and sort someone out to collect because your nursery closes AT 6.30 and there's no flexibility and the trains are fucked, not having to have the 'my day is more important than yours' conversation with your DH when one child is sick (or gets chickenpox, which is a week off nursery AND the other child is likely to get it ten days later)... it will just make life so much easier. Working FT with children is stressful, if you can make it a bit less so then I definitely would.

Nannies still coming if the child is ill is a significant benefit.

the looking after sick DC is a big benefit. I think at first i thought 'what if nanny is sick themselves' (which wouldn't be a problem with nursery), but in reality the occurrences are going to be much fewer than sick DC, especially with two of them. DS1 has been at nursery for a year and has only had two days off sick but i think we have just been very lucky (he has had his fair share of bugs but they actually tended to hit him at weekends and on holidays)...we still have chicken pox etc to come.

We have vaccinated our DC for chicken pox. I remember having it as a child and it was awful and I didn't want my DC going through it. Regardless of your choice of childcare I would definitely consider paying privately to get your DC vaccinated.

I would research more thoroughly in your local area to see the difference between nursery and nanny costs.

It's a few years ago for us but we paid £40 a day for nursery. When the eldest got their funded hours that covered 5 hours per day as I only worked 3 days, so that was a 50% reduction on the fees. We paid an absolute max of £8ph and that was only in the short period when both were in childcare before funded hours kicked in. After that it was more like £60 per day. I really don't think you'd get a nanny for that round here.

I'm not sure if you can use funded hours for a nanny, but if not that has quite a big impact over a year or more. Of course there are disadvantages to nursery but I'm not convinced the costs are in the same ballpark - round here, anyway.

We're in outer London and nursery here is £55-£70 a day per child.

We had a nanny when I first went back to work and then switched to nurseries. Having the right nanny is awesome, the dc loved her and it was much more flexible. BUT she became seriously ill. 3 months of paying SSP and paying for other childcare on top put us under financial pressure because we didnt have huge incomes (decent but not 6 figures between us) or financial reserves. It was horrible for the nanny too because in 20 years the only other time she'd been ill her employer paid her full wage.

I loved having a nanny but I think if you dont have spare capacity nursery is better

My local fb page is full of nannies looking for work. They all seem to want about £12 an hour. And moaning when they can't find work (none of them want to go back to nurseries as so poorly paid. It's insane. We had a nanny full time. It cost us around £2.5k a month to pay her which is a lot out of taxed salary. I think the new childcare cost scheme should help those with more than 2 children a lot now though.

Also, I don't think that nannies are necessarily the best form of childcare. I found that without lots of control they spent lots of time at soft play with their mates.

Ps we have a household income of around £180k and we still found it a struggle. Lifestyle to match our salary though!

Were around £200k joint income and I couldn't afford a full time nanny!

Our nanny salary incl.oncosts totally wipes out what remains of my consultant hospital dr salary after tax/ni/indemnity.

Bloody heartbreaking to go to work for nothing AND miss out on the kids when they are young. I have to though as I would deskill so badly as to become unemployable if i took time out.

Do a family budget and look at the local nanny rates (which vary widely) as that's the only way to know whether you can afford a nanny.

Having said that, make sure that once you do find someone, don't go cheap i.e. hire someone who really knows what they're doing. Going through an agency has the benefit that they will find another nanny if the first one doesn't work out, but it costs more.

Other thing to consider with a nanny - we had two go on maternity leave over the years. SMP is reclaimable but accrued holiday pay isn’t - so not only did we have to find & pay for temp nanny cover (not plentiful) but also pay upwards of £2k each time in annual leave payment.

To be honest - glad my two are almost adults now; we had pretty substantial family income but the unpredictability of employing individuals and cover for them really ate into it.