First on my list would be a live in house keeper shortly followed by a groundskeeper. Honestly I plan on getting back to weekly maid service this year and a weekly gardener within three years.
There is a large difference though between things getting dirty through out the week while still being livable and things never getting dirty. Having my dishes disappear of the table when I’m done eating or all of the dishes from cooking dinner clean themselves would get my wife and I to cook more. Daily vacuuming to keep up with the dog hair and dusting all of the surfaces so every room seats smelled clean. That would bed the life and really it’s only $60k/ year so it should be doable on $350k/year income.
The grounds keeper is more of a luxury and I would need enough ground to keep him busy year round probably 15 or so acres which is about $15 mil where I’d want it so I’d need about $5mil/year in income to make that work.
Or you could combine cook/housekeeper and groundskeeper/handyman.
One reason we have fewer servants these days is not just because of changes in relative wealth, but because labor-saving devices mean you don’t need as many servants because the servants themselves are using tools and appliances, making them more efficient.
My in-laws used to live next door to a family with the name Butler. Years ago, we were looking through their old photos and there was a group photo that included the neighbors.
Me: “Who are those people?”
Wife: “Those are the Butlers.”
Daughter (age 14): "You had butlers?!?!
mmm
I’m introverted enough that I wouldn’t want a full-time employee because having to constantly have the chance of interacting with someone with no respite would not be worth whatever value they’d bring. I’d have someone come in for a half-shift once a week to peremptorily clean my house and do my dishes and laundry if I hadn’t done so already. It could be accomplished in just 4 hours because I don’t have high standards and I wouldn’t want to live in much greater than 1000 square feet no matter how wealthy I am. At the most 2000 square feet with part of that being guest bedrooms/storage that don’t need to be cleaned as often.
I’d only hire a personal assistant if I were famous enough that it would be more taxing to go out in public a lot than to have someone around me for several half shifts a week to get my groceries/interact with deliverypeople, etc.
Thinking about it some more, I would hire several house-sitters since if I were wealthy I’d have several 1000-2000 square feet houses/condos across the world. They’d come closest to a servant since they would live in my house, just not when I was living there, and they’d get a decently-high equivalent pay since they’d get free rent and maybe a stipend for doing and/or arranging light maintenance and looking over the place for several months a year.
By most standards, I probably qualify as wealthy now (I’m not quite in the 1%, but definitely in the 2%). I have a landscape maintenance guy who comes once a week for about 30 minutes, and a house cleaner who comes every 2 weeks for about 3-4 hours.
If I was a billionaire with 10 houses spread around the world, I’d definitely want someone to at least keep an eye on things when I wasn’t there. But like a lot of people here, I value my privacy enough that I wouldn’t want a Downton Abbey type of situation. And I don’t like really big houses anyway. Lots of land, yes. But not a big house. I could see having a vineyard in the south of France and wanting to have some experts take are of it. Inside my house, I mostly want to be left alone with me and whomever I’m there with.
A “mere” millionaire probably wouldn’t spend money on things like that. But once your net worth gets north of, say, $30 million–that’s a different story.
We do have a gardener who comes by once a week. We’d likely hire a cleaner to come buy once a week also. But I don’t consider those servants. So, no, we wouldn’t hire servants.
I don’t know any parents who don’t need babysitters, at least- altho a lucky few have builtin on babysitters with grandparents, etc.
I would definitely have a live-in housekeeper. Mainly because I love to cook but hate to clean up the kitchen. I don’t mind cleaning chores, but they seldom make it to the top of my priority list, with the result that I am sometimes reluctant to invite people over. If I had that kind of money, I’d buy myself the luxury of a constantly company-ready home. For similar reasons, I’d want a gardener.
There are, of course, services one can hire, but I prefer to have one person I know, who gets to know my preferences. I have ideas for the garden, I just don’t want to weed it. And I don’t want the standard throw-away pansies that the service is putting everywhere else this week.
It would be great if the housekeeper was someone who would take on butler-level management chores - managing snow removal, pool service, auto repairs, and such. I would gladly have a service come do the heavy cleaning to free up time for that. It wouldn’t bother me if there were someone I trusted to watch over them.
I am nothing even close to wealthy and I have a housecleaning service every other week. the thing is, I am so bad at housecleaning that I can spend the whole day doing it, and yet there are wisps of dog hair and streaks of dust everywhere, when I’m done I’m NEVER done. The service sends somebody–it’s usually one person, sometimes two–after about two hours and never more than three the place is clean for at least a few hours before the dog hair starts to build up again.
The weird thing here is that I don’t mind wiping and scrubbing and vacuuming, what I don’t like is the prep, getting all my shit out of the way before dusting etc. I am paying someone to do the part I don’t mind, but before they get there I have to do the part I do mind. I don’t know if I could get used to having somebody else put my stuff away, but I expect I probably could. At any rate I think knowing the service is coming keeps me neater than I would naturally be.
I would love to have a personal chef, too. I hate cooking. I’m not bad at it, it’s just boring. But then I’m not wild about eating either. On my own, I would live on peanuts and fruit.
Probably not. I would hire contractors to do work on my house and property and possibly someone to mow the lawn and clear snow from the driveway. But no full-time servants.
This is very true. Go back just a little ways, and you would need a few people working full time just to keep your small family’s clothes laundered. Cooking, cleaning, landscaping, and everything else just required far more labor before we started having power tools and appliances become prevalent.
If you were to have any free time at all in order to do your high society functions, you had to have other people to do the menial chores.
This is still true today, to a lessor extent. Even with modern conveniences, if you are a lawyer or doctor or other highly skilled and compensated individual, it is a waste of not just your, but also of society’s, resources to have you vacuuming your own floor.
If you enjoy doing it yourself, that’s one thing. Even “high value” individuals need a hobby, and if your hobby is housekeeping, then that is fine. If you can get someone else to do the work so that you can have the time to spend more of your skills benefiting society, or your time on hobbies you enjoy more, that works out well.
Also, of course, this acts as an employment vector. You aren’t getting serfs and ordering them about, you are hiring people at a negotiated pay that presumably they are happy to exchange their time for.
Personally, I don’t like having people wait on me, and I’m not a fan of other people touching my stuff, so I don’t know how I would handle a situation where I could afford servants. I think at most, as far as inside goes, I’d hire a cook who would take care of the shopping, prep, and cleanup, while I took care of most of the actual cooking myself. I’d probably hire landscapers or at least someone to mow my lawn.
If I had north of $30M, and a good revenue stream, I would hire friends. By which I mean I would like a house full of weirdos enjoying themselves (a laYou Can’t Take It With You). They would be people with prettymuch nowhere else to go. At least one or two of them would be OCD, so they would keep the place fairly neat.
Depends on how you define servants. I’m fine with people coming in to clean once a week or so, and lawn service, not that we use either. I don’t really consider them servants, though. More someone dedicated to you or who lives in your house. That, no.
When I lived in Africa, like Chefguy having a servant who came in every day (I am not going to repeat the racist name for this job they used in 1961) and cleaned and made the big meal at lunch. That was expected, and he didn’t live with us. Okay, but I couldn’t stand that today.
My wife taught at a nanny school and part of the deal was hosting nannies who would work for you a certain number of hours a week in exchange for room and board. My wife was in charge of placing them so we always got good ones. I found having someone live with us annoying, though well worth it. But it was not something we wanted after it stopped being nearly free.
So, my answer is no.
my dad had a friend who was wounded in Vietnam enough to get out of combat service but not enough to get sent home … so they gave him a desk job at the army base in the Philippines
And since he was getting a bit of money he decided to move off base and the house came with a girl to take care of it which he didn’t mind but the problem was the girl was pretty much a “leased girlfriend” but being from the Midwest he didn’t pick up on what her duities entailed and was quite shocked when she climbed in to bed one night for her "womanly duties " and she was quite upset when he refused … (Not that he resisted for long since they married and had 8 kids eventually)
but he learned that it wasn’t unusual for such an arrangement and if he moved out shed of stayed for the next tenant and some renters around had 5 or 6 kids around town …t
the landlords would go to the poor villages and pretty much buy them from the parents with monthly payments and if they didn’t find someone to marry just keep going from place ot place …or back to the village with what ever money and gifts they’d gotten over the years
Is the OP distinguishing between a “servant” and a “service provider”? Ordinarily, those two things have very different connotations. If I can afford it I will gladly hire a professional cleaning service and professional a lawn care service, in the same way that I might hire a professional plumber or electrician or auto mechanic. But I don’t consider any of these to be servants.
I enjoy cooking, but I really enjoy a great meal and a professional chef would, of course, blow me away in terms of overall quality. I would almost certainly hire a personal chef if I had the money.