My nanny share was more expensive than day care — and more work
I thought my daughter would have a better time in a nanny share than a traditional day care. We ended up paying way more and doing more admin work.
Courtesy of the author
- After exploring different options for childcare my husband and I chose a nanny share.
- I assumed, incorrectly, that at a day care my daughter would receive less attention.
- A day care would've been cheaper and we would've done less admin work.
When my daughter was born my husband and I explored a few different options for childcare.
A nanny share interested us because of the more personalized attention my daughter would get. At day care, she'd be one of 10 babies in a class, which I (incorrectly) assumed would mean a lower level of care. We had also heard a nanny share would save us money.
We lasted three months before enrolling her in day care.
Our nanny share would have cost us thousands more a year
I'm not sure why I thought we'd save money with a nanny share — it's illogical to think you'd get a 2-for-1 special by adding another kid into the mix.
It would be unfair to ask someone to charge the same to do more work, but I assume that's what people think when I see advice that doing a nanny share is a way to save on childcare.
When we joined, our nanny was working with a family who paid $20 an hour for their daughter.
Adding our daughter took the total price to $30 an hour. So yes, if we had been set on using a nanny instead of day care, doing a share would have saved us money. We would have saved $5 an hour doing the share vs having a dedicated nanny, which over the course of a year would have saved us almost $10,000.
But a nanny share compared to day care? It didn't even come close. The math just did not math when we compared what we were paying to the daycares in the area.
With the nanny share, we would have ended up paying just under $30,000 for a full year of care. At our current day care, we pay just under $18,000 for the year.
That means over the course of the six years we'll need childcare before we can enroll my daughter in public school that the nanny share would have been a whopping $72,000 more expensive.
The pros of doing a share and the quality of care my daughter received would have had to outweigh the cons of doing day care for that price tag. They didn't.
There was more admin work, and we didn't save time
Because we paid our nanny "on the books," we spent time and additional money setting up a payroll service to pay her. While necessary, it felt like an annoying hurdle.
We also didn't save any time by doing a share — we had to pack all of our daughter's food and still had to do drop off and pick up each day.
These are minor things, but they added up as we grew progressively less enamored by what we felt we were getting for the price we were paying.
The quality of care wasn't better
There's no doubt our nanny loved our child. But when we started talking to friends with kids in day care, we were impressed by the curriculums the centers offered and impressed with how they talked about what their children were learning, even at a young age.
There was a clear difference to what we were experiencing. For us, that was the final straw on the big pile of reasons to stop the nanny share.
We wanted the best for our child, which we had assumed meant paying more, but that ended up not being true for us.
Our daughter is happy at day care, and we love her teachers. She gets plenty of personalized attention, is constantly impressing us with what she's learned and we've saved a lot going this route. I'm glad we made the switch.