School is starting and the kids are not going - journey for a nanny - Reflection

 To start off we hired a nanny.  This was one of the most difficult things for me to do.  I find it very hard to hire someone to do something you can do for yourself as well as letting someone into our home that I don't know.  

Our decision came process  went like this:  REASON, NEEDS, AFFORD, WAN

• REASON: First school is starting and do we feel it is a good idea to send them with the uncertainty of school. Will school stay open all the whole time and will they be safe even though we know the school is doing there best and we are doing our best. We don't trust other families to do there best. Sad I know but true. Just walk around the parks or a store. 
• NEEDS: Second can we keep splitting our schedule like we did all end of last year and summer?  No! We did a great job helping the kids through school and summer. I took on most of the schooling and the kids showed progress, but I felt I was not doing them justice in working full-time and teaching them 80% time which my wife doing the other 20%.  We had a school teach friend help out for a few weeks over the summer and they really focused better and responded more to planned lessons. 
• AFFORD:  Can we afford to only go to a single salary to cover and do we want to do that.  In sort could be, maybe but it would of been tights and we would of basically put a spot on retirement savings. Then with the economy tanking we felt it wasn't the best time to make this big move. 
• AFFORD:  How much could we afford to get someone how could fill in as a nanny as well as assist with there education entering into first grade.  Lucky for us we had friends hiring there own nanny to assist with there kids as well. So we were able to leverage some of there resources. Two things we had to consider was number of hours worked and hourly pay.  Originally we talked about 30 hours a week, but it required us to still have a split schedule which negated some of the needs to decided on.  We ended up on a range 35-40 and depending on the hourly rate we would talk about the total which we settled on 35 hours a week.  For the hourly rate we leveraged hour friends and care.com that placement agency.  They performed all the background checks and posted our position.  We felt a nanny is pay what you get. With our needs and two kids with potential of being a full-time teach we were definitely will to pay more then what Glassdoor and such say are average salaries.
  
• WANT: He did have pretty high requirements since we were taking the kids out of school because of the virus we wanted someone that took protection seriously. Need some type of experience either teach, working with kids, or nanny.  We lucked out and interviewed two great candidates and hired one of them.  Did the whole negotiation on hours and hourly rate and signed a contract.  We settled on a salary and for us it will make the next year do able, but not easy. We will have to cut back, but we already were cutting back due to the lock down. 
  

 All of these things had to work our for us to hire someone. The worst part about this was we needed to make a choice about in-person learning or at-home learning pretty early on.  In fact the schools didn't know how they were going to handle in person learning yet.  Which didn't make the choice any easier. 

So far three weeks in our nanny is great.  She has similar teach methods and ideals as we do and she is able to compliment the online teacher very well.  She had previous experience at a per-school, worked over seas creating lesson plans for schools in 3rd world countries, and just earned her teaching certs.

Here are some hidden expenses that we didn't really put into our calculations

• Nanny tax which is Employer Social Security and Medicare, as well as federal and state unemployment insurance
  
• Worker compensation insurance. Some states require this. Probably best to just get it
• Food. Nanny has to eat and if they are staying in your house 7-8 hours a day and helping make meal for the kids. They got to eat.  Now this is kind of a write off since we usually have some small portion of food either expire or go bad. - we all have something to work on
• Payroll service - Since we were new and had a lot going on we farmed this out to a company called poppinspayroll.com 
• How to best save the money to pay the taxes when they come due each quarter.