Never having employed a pet sitter I’m concerned because the one we plan to use wants to be paid, in full, well in advance of the trip. We’ll have already left when she arrives, so I had assumed that we would just leave her fee where she’ll see it when she walks in. But it turns out she wants it by the end of April, 10 days before we are to leave.
Is this normal in the business? I can understand how people in that line of work might need to insist that everyone pay up by the end of the preceding month, so that they can make their own rent or mortgage, and so on. But now I’m getting a bit uneasy. We’re supposed to give this person $75 a day over five days to live in our house and look after our cats, and she won’t even be there when we leave, and she’ll already have her fee in full over a week before.
To be fair, she doesn’t sound like a flake at all. She’s older, about 65, and my wife met her through a service club she belongs to.
We’ve hired a few different pet sitters, one of which asked to be paid in advance. The latter was part of an actual pet sitting business, licensed and bonded, so I’d imagine that’s just their way to avoid having to chase people down for money after they’ve provided the service.
If it was just some random person, I wouldn’t pay them in advance, since you have no way of knowing if they’re just going to take the money and vanish. Of course, now that I think about it, why would you give you house key to anyone you’re worried about ripping you off?
I wouldn’t do that, and it has not been my experience to pay petsitters or housesitters in full long before the employment ever starts. I would not trust that the person would show up since he no longer has any incentive to.
Does any service business expect 100% payment BEFORE any services have been rendered? I can’t think of any that do. A deposit, maybe; but not payment in full.
She obviously needs the money, but that’s not your problem. The only reason you would agree to pay her early is because you are desperate for a pet setter and can’t find any one else. What happens is she cancels on you at the last minute and doesn’t give your money back? If you hire her, I hope you have a backup who will check to make sure she’s showing up to take care of your pets. The whole situation is weird.
I usually give a pet setter half the money in advance (usually the last time I expect to see them before I leave) and the rest when I return.
Well, I’ve had some few petsitting clients “forget” to leave me a check. And then repeatedly “forget” to send it afterward. These were almost exclusively people who I had no previous professional dealings with, and who had offered me larger sums of money than I normally charged. I never did get my money out of some of them. I solved that problem by no longer petsitting for people who weren’t either clients of my clinic or acquaintances of me or Dr.J.
If this woman only knows you peripherally and has been burned a few times before, I can totally see her wanting to get her check and make sure it clears before providing services.
I worked for a pet sitting service for about 4 years, and it was company policy to get a check for full payment at the time the contract for the services was signed (though this could be as late as the day before the people were leaving - we didn’t have any requirement for how far in advance payment needed to be made). The reason for the policy is just as Giraffe says. There are enough people out there who think that once they’ve used your service, payment is optional to make the policy necessary.
We were bonded and insured, and the contract stipulated what services we would provide for the period of time outlined and what the payment would be for those services.
It’s not that unusual in certain brances of photography. Wedding photography, for instance, almost always requires an initial deposit and then full payment a couple months before the services are actually performed.
If bonded and licensed, or a good deal of trust based on social interaction (and personal information), I’d pay up.
Otherwise, she could run and go and you’d have little recourse.
That said. I’d think a sixty-five-year-old woman you come across through a social network is a DAMN SAFE bet for not running off underground with your money.
But you never know. Could you get a friend to casually drop by and make sure your pet is OK and give you a call?
Myself and my pets, I’d get a either bonding or some plan B.
I’ve housesat before, and I never thought of asking for the money before I did the deed. Same with babysitting.
On a semi-related note, how does one become bonded as a pet/house/babysitter? I’ve been thinking about doing this part-time while I try to get a job and I think I’ll have better luck sitting for strangers if I’m bonded (the housesitting gig and most of the babysitting jobs were provided by people in the neighborhood or people who knew my family), but I don’t know how to go about it or what it costs. Is it just like a background check or something?
I think bonding is mostly like liability insurance, where you get a little bit of underwriting (i.e. some background–maybe credit check and criminal check) but mostly you pay premiums (or some lump sum) to cover your risk in case you cause damage to someone else.
That’s what I’d want from a house/pet sitter that I didn’t know personally.
We once hired the vet assistant at our cat’s doctor’s office. We’d known her a while from the office, she knew our cats, and her family lived close by anyway, even though she was out of college and not living at home any longer.
She arrived the week before we left with a questionaire about the cats likes and dislikes, who likes to play with the mouse, who likes the shoelaces, etc… We signed a contract and paid her upfront.
If you have a service contract, it’s not unusual to pay at least part of the contract upfront.
Bonding refers to the purchase of a surety bond (through a bonding and/or insurance agency) that protects clients and business owners in case of employee theft. These can be inexpensive, depending on the terms - for instance, many bond contracts state that the employee must be arrested and convicted of the theft before the company will pay out for the stuff stolen, so there’s a lot that has to happen before a payment is made. I’m not sure what actual checks are involved - when I was working for the pet sitting company, all the paperwork was done by the owner of the company, so if there was an actual background check done on me I was unaware of the exact details. No one asked me any questions other than the usual stuff one gets asked when one applies for a job.
Insurance is another matter altogether, which is why you hear the term ‘bonded and insured.’ It can be liability insurance, so if someone gets hurt (say, I slip on the sidewalk outside the house or the dog bites me or someone else) that’s covered. There can also be property insurance, which would cover any damage that might happen during the performance of my duties (let’s say I’m chasing after the cat to give it a pill and I break a lamp in the process).
The company I worked for also paid into workmen’s comp, so if an injury on that job were to make me unable to work at my full-time job, I would have compensation for lost wages and medical expenses.