Advice pls from those who have had/have an au pair/nanny/home help

[ChaCha]

I have 3 children who are 4 months old, 22 months old and the eldest has just turned 3. My DH isn't around much due to heavy work schedule and so we've agreed that i need some help during the day. I thought long and hard about an au pair but we like our space in the evenings and our house is quite small so have placed an ad for a live out au pair, nanny or basic home help.
Have had an overwhelming number of responses and need to set up interviews with a few next week.
Just asking really what kind of wage i should be expecting to pay? Is it mainly hourly or by day? Am completely new to this.
To begin with i only want 3-4 hours a day and during that time some help with the children or helping with basic housework while i do activities with them, all dependent on what needs to be done that day.

Will look at longer hours when i'm familiar with them.

any advice welcome and thanks

Let's say you want four hours a day, five days a week. That makes it a proper part-time job for someone - probably someone with children of their own who can come to you during school hours. Would that be convenient for you? Or will that be a problem re taking your 3 year old to pre-school and wanting to leave your babies at home?

I would personally want this person to do all the basic daily tidying and cleaning, laundy and ironing while I played with my children. But you will probably also want her to watch one/two children while you do things with another.

Thanks Anna, my 3 year old doesn't go to preschool hence one of my needs to spend quality time with him, we just don't get enough with DS1 and DS2 demanding me too.

Minimum you can offer will be National Minimum Wage, which changes depending on the applicants age. As it is a live-out job, it isn't exempt from NMW regulations.

Have any of the applicants given an idea of what they want to be paid? You could ask them what salary they were on in their last/current job. You could ask them how much they expect to be paid.

I would expect that £6 upwards Gross Per Hour is achievable - I doubt NMW will be that attractive, but paying a bit above it will be of interest to some candidates. It depends on what the candidate will accept - your aim is to get the best candidate to fit your needs, at the lowest cost.

Make sure you understand the PAYE system, Registering as an Employer with HMRC, how to do weekly/monthly payroll etc. It is important that any salary agreed is agreed GROSS (that is, before employee tax deductions) as the candidate may have other work in addition to your job - thus their personal tax allowance may not be allocated to your job. You can find out more about Gross v Net wages by searching message threads on the Childminders, Nannies, Au-Pairs board.

Not being quote clear precisely what you want isn't such a bad place to start from as you might think. Then you can select on the person you think fits you all best and arrange hours/tasks around what you can mutually agree.

You might want a mother's help, who is more inclined to do housework as well as looking after children. You might want a nanny who does only child related housework (cooking washing/drying children's clothes). Or you might find somebody somewhere in the middle whom you can make a good agreement with. But don't expect a fully qualified nanny to do cleaning other than that directly related to the DCs.

It does sound like you're after a mother's help - agree with ThingOne that a fully qualified nanny is not going to be happy to do housework apart from child-related stuff (ours unloads the dishwasher and hangs up washing but that's it). Rates will sort of be determined by the going local rate - can you check on Gumtree or somewhere similar to see what people are asking?

I wish! Would come in handy when fighting off the manxsome foe on the Tube on the way into work in the morning.