I keep seeing posts wander through the Internet about a
husband that wants to pay his wife to stay home with their child. In the end, he’s mad because he can’t pay her
his perceived salary of close to $100,000 per year and still pay the
bills.
Let me say this up front: my wife is a stay at home mom of
three kids, not one. She has a very hard
job in taking care of the household.
The value my wife adds to my life is incapable of being counted. If I lost my wife, my life would be devastated from the loss of her. Not from the loss of what she does. I love her to death.
But it’s not a $100,000 a year job on the open market.
It’s a horrible argument that is used to trump up the job of
stay at home moms. It’s an argument made
by people who don’t know business. It’s
an argument made by people who want money for breathing. If any one of these people really forked out
the kind of money they talk about, they would quickly change their
standards.
But let’s get to the real problem with the argument. The original writer of the argument assumes
that everything a stay at home mom does should get charged at a different
rate. That’s just crazy. Let’s make an adequate comparison. I have an office. I keep it relatively clean most of the
time. I don’t get paid a dime to clean
my office. I clean it because I’m not a
slob, and because I’m an adult. I clean
it because it’s part of presenting a professional appearance. But I don’t get paid a separate rate to clean
my office. I don’t work for a union that
says I can only do one single job. I do
it all because that is what I was hired to do.
I have to do my job, plus all sorts of other little things that
seemingly have nothing to do with my job.
Clerical? Tied in with the
package. Negotiation? With the package. Data entry?
Part of the job.
The major invalid assumption of the argument is that each
service is being purchased ala carte from an outside vendor. That can be done, but hiring ala carte is
about hiring a professional. And hiring
a professional means you get someone who works faster than the average person
at their job.
Let’s compare laundry.
If I was to hire ala carte for laundry, then I would bag my laundry up,
and leave for work a few minutes early.
I would stop by a laundromat and drop off my laundry, and pay by the
pound to get someone else to clean my laundry.
I would come back on my way home to find my laundry complete and ready
for pickup. Total amount of my time: 20
minutes. And laundry goes for about $1 a
pound. Given an adequate clothes supply,
laundry could be dropped off once or twice a week without real problems.
Following that same line of reasoning, you could easily
negotiate salary positions to handle every single household task. And once the child becomes school age, then
the amount of time hired to do those tasks drops dramatically due to the child
being in school. The average day would
go from 10 hours to 5. Half the time
involved? Half the pay involved. Unless the nanny is hired at salary. And that’s what the intelligent nanny is going
to do to even out their paycheck.
Now, I'm excluding places where living expenses are out of control Those places are just flat crazy. And $100,000 in those local dollars is really not the same amount in comparison to other locations.
Realistically, I've had to think about what would happen if my wife died. And in that case, what would I do? Really, I could replace my wife with a 15 year term life insurance policy for about $500,000. In comparison, I need about $800,000 on me. That's from the purely financial perspective.
Due to getting out of debt, I don't have $800,000 on me. I have $400,000. So should I die, my wife is good for 5-6 years. Should my die, I'm screwed as I don't have anything on her. Kids each have a $10,000 burial stipend tied to my life insurance policy. And term life is cheap. I pay about $35 per month.
