Full fees if parents holiday,half fees for mine. Does that sound fair

[childminder01ramsgate]

Hi there,
I was just wondering what other childminders charge during the holidays.
At the moment i charge full fees if parents on holiday and nothing for mine. But im thinkng of changing it as last time the parents went on holiday and still left baby with me while garndparents picked him up so never got any holiday. STitched myself up there. I really need a week at christmas which i think is fair and at moment i will get nothing as i know parents will still send them in even though its christmas week. I would keep mine home if it was me so i end up losing out. So wanted gto know does anyone else do full fees for parents and half for there own or full fees for both?

Not bitter, but not quite getting your head around the self employed thing. I do think you need to do what any service-provider should, and check out the competition. What do local minders charge? What are their arrangements for holidays? Sick days (your own or the mindees)?

I wouldn't want to pay for your holidays, but would of course pay if I am on holiday and my child doesn't attend. When my son went to a childminder, she had announced her holidays (so times when she wouldn't be available) in advance, but of course didn't charge for it.

I'm not being rude btw - I do contracting and don't get paid for my holidays either. Paid holidays is one of the benefits of permanent employment, not self employed people.

I wouldn't pay a S/E person for their holidays either - its a perk of being employed. Why would I pay for a service that is not available?

With regards to your comments about tax credits, tax credits may make equal payments every week/month but its just split down into those payments so if you charge £7k a year then they declare that as the cost and get paid an equal instalments every month. They dont get "free weeks" as such unless they have declared the wrong figures.

"I wouldn't pay a S/E person for their holidays either - its a perk of being employed. Why would I pay for a service that is not available?"

Well it is normal round our way for CMs to charge for their holidays.

And likewise private nurseries round here usually charge for bank holidays. You pay a fixed weekly sum with no reductions if "your" day falls on a BH.

So it's not just childminders...

c/m are different to other s/e people though because we are providing a permanent service.
i charge full for my hols {4 weeks} and parents can take an extra 4 weeks at half-rate - this is what i tell them at the enquiry stage - it's on my T & C and on the contracts agreed by parents.

as a parent i'd rather use a c/m who did the same as i do - that way my children would be looked after by someone who could afford to take a break and recharge their batteries every few months without having to worry about scraping up the money to pay the bills - c/m is a bloody hard job.

A lot of CMs factor their holiday into their rates though.

For example if your CMs hourly rate works out to £200/week instead of paying 52 x 200 / 12 every month she factors in 4 weeks holiday and charges fir 48 x 200 / 12. That's the way most that I know do it anyway.

That's also how nurseries do it too - it's not that they get paid for BHs, it's that the monthly or weekly fixed fee already compensates for the day which aren't paid.

There are plenty of SE people who provide permanent services, but one key an employee and a SE person hinges is whether they can decide if they want to work or not, but the flip-side is they don't get paid.

A CM, going down to 4 days a week, just gas to give notice and that's that. A nanny would have to request it and it is at the mercy of her employers. A CM can decide to take as many holidays as they like - not great business sense but that's the deal. Part of being SE is dealing with things like risk and financial loss so whilst it may be tge norm in some areas it's not because CMs are somehow different to most SE people. Most SE people, if still being paid, would sub-contract to someone.

As a CM, whether mum/dad is at work/buffing their nails whilst I care for that child... it doesn't bother me. It shouldn't. I am being paid to look after their child and what they do with their own time is their own business.

I charge full fee whilst the child is on holiday. I charge 2 weeks pro rata for my holidays... and take as much holiday as I like. I took 2 weeks one year, and 5 weeks the next (having family in two overseas countries doesn't help!). I need this flexibility.

Yes I have a couple of weeks with no pay, but I feel less bad about me having the flexibility of how much time off I want (am always very thoughtful re this by the way) by doing it this way.

I budget for those times I'll be away as any SE person has to do. I have just put my fees up for the first time in 3 years, which has also helped ;)

"That's also how nurseries do it too - it's not that they get paid for BHs"

Actually sorry to correct you but round here some nurseries DO charge for bank holidays.

The one I used to use has a fixed daily rate, and that rate doesn't alter whether you use them every Thursday or every Monday. However if you use them every Monday you still have to pay 52 weeks a year, regardless of the fact that approx 8 of those weeks are unusable due to bank holidays.

My friend only uses nursery one day a week (Mondays) and asked for a discount for this reason, and was told that they charge for bank holidays like any other day because they still have to pay the staff.

So to suggest that the bank holidays are not charged, and the discount is averaged out across the year is not the case (at least for some places - others do it differently).

They do not charge for an annual two-week closure, but this is factored into their weekly charges and IS averaged out.

The one I worked for (and all the others in the chain) did it like this:

arbitrary figure x working days in a year (so not taking into account weekends, Bank Holidays or whole nursery closures)

then / 12 to give a monthly rate

or / 52 to give a weekly rate, which was then /5 for a daily rate or /5 and x 2,3,4 to give part time rates

I once asked them pretty much the same question - why they charge for holidays - and the manager said that they didn't as such, it was accounted for in the calculation. So yes, they seem to get paid for Bank Holidays but actually it's a built in compensation mechanism. Unfair if you only use a nursery on a Monday but not all Bank Holidays are Mondays....

Presumably they're used to getting that question!

But that's just the rate they charge then - isn't it?

You can only say they are not charging for BH's if they actually do pass on that discount.

What you've described is just how they set their daily rate. They could only claim that they were discounting for BH's if they actually passed the discount on, relative to how many bank holidays you use.

Do you see what I'm saying? If they don't pass the discount on fairly, then it doesn't make any difference whether they claim to be charging or not - whatever they do on paper before announcing their day-rate, in practise what they are doing is charging a set daily rate regardless of whether the nursery is open or not.

See to my mind they aren't charging their daily rate, because the figure they use to calcuate, and the figure they charge for one-off care, is different. This isn't a debate about nursery pricing structures, though!

To my mind it's the same as a CM saying okay I charge £4/hour so over a normal day (8-6) I charge £40, which is £200 a week making it £10,400 a year (if you have an ongoing arrangement) BUT I take 5.6 weeks off unpaid (4 week plus BHs) so my annual rate is £9,280, which you can pay as a monthly figure of £775 (or £773.33), or a weekly figure of £180 (or £178.46 if you wanted to be precise).

That way the holiday itself isn't charged but the income is spread over the year.

Both are passing on the discount.

A true 'daily' rate would be the nursery/CM saying 'I charge £40 a day even when I'm not open for business'. Like a nanny with a weekly rate of £200 but does get paid holidays so the income is £10,400 a year.

All I'm saying is that sometimes you appear to be 'paying for holidays' when in fact it's built into the payment structure so you don't.

Equally, of course, a CM could do various calculations to say that this year I'll be working 40 Mondays out of the 52 therefore it'll be £1,600 over the year which you can pay monthly as £133.33, but then you run into problems if they leave half way through the year....

So really sometimes it's easier if parents can pay weekly in arrears according to timesheets like most SE people. But that means you have 'unpaid' weeks and the amount used each month changes.