I already have a lawn company (in season), take my dog to daycare from time to time, and have a cleaning service that comes to my house every other week*. But if I were seriously wealthy? Full-time staff would definitely include:
[ul]
[li]**A chef. **I live alone and hate to cook, I’m a somewhat picky eater, I’m fat, and I’m diabetic. I fantasize regularly about hiring someone to prepare all of my meals and snacks – which will be both tailored to my tastes, and reasonably healthy.[/ul]and[ul][/li][li]A mechanic, to look after my many cars. In addition to keeping them in perfect running order at all times, he/she would keep them spotless. In fact, I aspire to own enough cars to require two mechanics.[/ul][/li]
Usually I’m at work and the dog is at daycare while the ladies are there, but if I happen to be working from home that day it doesn’t bother me: I leave the dog in the master bedroom with the door closed and ask the ladies to ignore that room, and I ask them to kick me out of the home office whenever they’re ready to tackle it (at which point I go hang out in the living room for a little while). If the weather is nice, I’ll take the dog out back and sit on the patio the whole time they’re there. I never had a problem with strangers being in my house: for me, the hardest part was feeling completely lazy and guilty for not cleaning my own (small) space. But it didn’t take long to get over that. I’m really good at keeping the house neat, and making sure counters are clean, but I’m horrible about floors and bathrooms. It’s soooo nice to never have to worry about them! And, twice a month all of the dog fur is gone…for a few minutes, anyway.
Didnt most americans back in the day have a housekeeper? Think “Alice” on “The Brady Bunch”. Actually in the first season of “Leave it to beaver” they also had a housekeeper. Some were live in.
I’m also seeing alot of people in California seem to have hispanics or Filipinos as housekeepers/nannies. some of those are live in.
I’ve never really given this much thought, but I’ll agree with several other posters that the idea of having non-family-members hanging around the house gives me the creeps. I don’t care if they are all honest and hard-working professionals; I don’t want them around. In fact, I’ve never understood the rich people in movies and TV shows who have PAs, cooks, butlers, housekeepers, nannies, and others wandering around their mansions and estates. “Good evening, sir. Mr. Smith is in the library, if you would care to join him.” Yecch!!
OTOH, my wife and I do have house cleaners in a couple times a month and lawn/yard crews in weekly, even though we are pretty middle-class. We’re older and just not up to doing everything ourselves. It’s totally worth the money.
If I had the money for it, I’d have a person come by once or twice a week for house cleaning and someone else come by every couple of weeks to do yard work. I don’t love cooking but wouldn’t hire someone to cook for me.
My first real job came with a 2bedroom flat (apartment) as part of the package. I also got a cleaning lady twice a week. I was normally at work when she came, but I could always tell when she had visited. The vacuum would be left in the hallway and not put back in the cupboard where she’d got it from. She would always make herself a cup of tea and then leave the dirty mug in the sink. It drove me crazy that she was leaving the place in a worse state then when she arrived. Although I know that was just my OCD-lite kicking in.
I tried asking for her not to visit, but was told it would set a precedent and upset all of the other cleaning ladies. Of course, the guy who told me this was later sent to prison on fraud charges relating to contract bribes, so he possibly had his own reasons for keeping her employed.
If absolutely nothing else in my life changed, no.
If I went out and bought a big mansion with lots of land (which I probably would do), oh yeah. Definitely would have a dedicated housekeeper and groundskeeper, as many as needed.
Grew up in California. Did not know anyone who did this. Plenty of people have a cleaning service come in, and hispanic women do almost all of this kind of work.
Maybe in Los Angeles. That’s a different part of the world than the rest of California.
I’m wealthy enough to hire help, and I haven’t. For my mother (and Littlebro while he was single) it is preferable to have someone else handle those duties; for me, it is preferable to know that if I can’t find something it’s because I left it someplace else, not because someone decided to “put it away” in a place that makes zero sense to me. If I wanted to put up with other people’s sense of order, I’d live with my mother
By the time I’m infirm enough I need as much physical help as my mother does, the plan is to move into assisted living. It’s what Abuelita did, of her own free will; Mom’s opted instead for bemoaning her “lost independence”, when in fact she’s always been extremely dependent (I know people with disabled parking tags who are fifty times more independent).
I’d certainly pay for services; house cleaning and maintenance, gardening and landscaping, laundry, driving and car maintenance.
I love to cook so would not hire a full time chef but would love to hire someone who would take my list of meals, shop for the groceries, do some of the prep, and clean up afterwards.
The last time PowerBall had reached a jackpot worthy of headlines my boyfriend and I were working a jigsaw puzzle on the night of the drawing. We were prattling about what we’d do if we won (athough neither if us had bought a ticket that week). I mused that I would hire someone to dump new puzzles out and turn all the pieces face up.
I learned a new term from the NY Times recently: a “hundy”.
If the article is to be believed, a hundy is a family with a net worth of at least 100 million . At that point the rich (the ones with a B), start to notice them. They have enough for appearances-maybe not a private jet but they lease them when they want to, trust funds for the kids, acceptable private schools, large enough donations to the Met (don’t know whether it is the theater or the museum, perhaps both) to buy a table once a year, etc. Not in the B class, but enough to be worth associating with.
Being a millionaire these days barely qualifies for upper middle class. The real threshold is the hundy!
We had a nanny for many years for the kids. Her job was to look after the kids - but when they were school age, rather than cutting her hours and pay, we asked her to handle family laundry for us. It was wonderful.
We do have a cleaning service every 2 weeks. I wouldn’t want someone there every day, but having someone there 2-3 days a week to clean different parts of the house, maybe do some of the grocery shopping, and do some basic meal prep, would be a nice thing.
I doubt we’d hire a chauffeur or whatever. We’d probably “downsize” from a house to a condo that was talking distance to things, and drive only occasionally, so that’d be crazy. We’d have the time do do most of our own paperwork and other organizing tasks.
A personal shopper: I could see contracting that out periodically. I hate shopping for clothes. Though these days I mostly live in T-shirts and jeans so it wouldn’t be an arduous job.
I have a dear cleaning lady who comes in two mornings a month. She tidies and cleans the house and irons the line-hung laundry. (Laundry that doesn’t need ironing, I take of the line myself and stuff in closets)
My gardener and handyman comes in a couple hours three times a year.
And this is the last year that my ten-year old son stays in his after school care-center from 3 to 5.30. He used to do that three days a week.
And I’m an unpaid personal shopper to two friends that hate clothes shopping, but that’s a hobby.
