You decide: What is a baby sitter worth?
Posted
Sep 11 2008, 03:06 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Now that the youngest of their four kids is 3 (and the oldest is 10), Nickel at Five Cent Nickel and his wife are rediscovering their social life. They're paying a teenager they know $10 an hour to baby-sit.
He thinks that's a bit higher than the going rate where he lives, and he asked his readers for their thoughts. This post is particularly valuable because so many people chimed in.
Many of his readers agreed that he's paying a fair price, but apparently a lot depends on where you live.
When David of My Two Dollars lived in Los Angeles, his wife was paid $15 an hour for the first child, and $5 an hour for each additional kid. Where he now resides -- in Taos, N.M. -- the rate is $12 an hour. His friends in San Francisco pay $15 to $20 an hour.
Reader "saltinesgirl" says she pays $15 an hour for an adult baby sitter in Seattle. "This is someone that can drive, knows CPR and isn't on the phone/computer the entire time," she writes.
In Boston, Geoff writes, the rate for an adult baby sitter is $15 to $20 an hour. Outside Minneapolis, Danielle says, "my friends pay $6 an hour for teen baby sitters, and they pay the highest rate of anyone I know for their one child." Readers in Ohio, West Virginia and North Carolina also reported hourly rates of less than $10.
Some readers were clearly more entrepreneurial than others. Blaine Moore said that when he used to baby-sit more than a decade ago, he charged $15 to $18 an hour. Actually, he set a total price for the evening, but it worked out to that. He added that "most of the people didn't do the math to figure out how much they were paying ...."
Deepali at Paradigm Shifted thought some of those who left comments are cheap, and offered some observations about the job, "not to mention the sick kids, the messy kids, the not-quite-potty-trained kids, the crying kids, the bratty spoiled kids. And these really are your kids," she said. "... You have to pay a fair rate for dealing with all of this."
Baby-sitting isn't our thing, so we agree with what Mr. ToughMoneyLove had to say: "You couldn't afford to pay me enough to watch four kids under 10."
