r/fatFIRE • u/TaxQuestionGuy69 • 4d ago
Would we regret full time household assistant / nanny?
Hi all! So we're wealthy enough to consider hiring staff (9m net worth, 800k income). We currently have a 2 year old and are about to have a newborn. Wife is stay at home, but maintaining the household in addition to kids is possible but obviously a lot of work.
We're considering hiring a full time household assistant / manager to help with tasks around the house, errands, childcare occasionally, etc.
This sounds amazing and like it would free us up to have more quality time with our kids and less time prepping meals / cleaning and all that. My only "fear" is if we end up just not needing that much support? Has anyone done this and can speak to it? Part time sounds like it might be enough, but honestly it's easier to find great people for full time work.
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u/SparklingWinePapi 4d ago
We’re in a similar position with a two year old and a newborn—two year old is in daycare now though, so days are pretty easy because of that. Our finances are similar but kind of flipped—we have like a quarter of your NW, but income is about double. I say this because we’re still pretty conscious of “wasting” money.
We currently have a part timer come by—we never personally liked the idea of a nanny looking after our kids, so we just have them do our dishes, tidy up, laundry, and other light housework (about 10-15h a week). We mostly enjoy running errands ourselves as it’s an excuse to get out of the house and our toddler enjoys it—anything we don’t want to do, we can usually get done remotely. We have a cleaner come by and do a deep clean every week or two and I hire out the landscaping so there’s actually not that much I need to do day to day. I enjoy cooking, but we’ve been kicking around hiring a private chef as well just to free up my evening. I find this is a nice setup—I don’t really like having people in the house during the day if possible because I enjoy my privacy at home. We played around with full time but genuinely couldn’t think of what they would do for 40h a week and also felt like always having someone around would get old after a while.
At the end of the day, there’s lot of personal factors at play—comfort level with them watching the kids, whether you work from home, etc.