Household Bills
Blog: What value can you put on Mum?
Hopefully, many of us will have spent this weekend reflecting on how much we value our mothers. We may have bought flowers or cooked her lunch, but most of us probably haven’t given her an exact monetary value.
Let me be clear, I’m not suggesting that the work a mother does is purely financial. Or indeed that mothers could be traded in and replaced with ones that are a bit less shouty and don’t make you tidy up. I’m suggesting that families recognise that the work a mother does has an actual monetary value. Too often, financial planning revolved exclusively around the loss in earnings of the main breadwinner rather than the financial cost of replacing the person who (probably) does everything else.
The easiest way to look at it is to determine how much it might cost to hire someone to do the work done by a mother. This sounds a little mercenary, but this is what would have to happen were a mother to take off with the plumber/milkman/tennis coach.
Those looking after pre-school children would be very expensive to replace. If you hoped to retain a full time job, you would almost certainly need a nanny unless you had a very flexible employer. The website Simply Childcare (http://www.simplychildcare.com/) says: “the average salary for a live out nanny in the London area and immediate surrounds is £9.50 to £10 net per hour with £10 net per hour becoming more common. This is £95 to £100 net per day for the average 10 hour nanny day.”
But of course, this is net. As the site says: “£470 net per week means a parent is going to have to find approx £676 gross per week to cover everything: the nanny’s net wage, her tax and both sets of NI. And £500 net per week would be £726 approx gross.” That brings a mother’s ‘worth’ up to over £35,000 per year. This may fall when the children hit school age, but there are still all those school holidays to cover.
The chances are that your average mother also does a bit of cleaning now and then. That could add on another £50 per week for a cleaner. This is £200 a month or £10,000 a year.
So unless you happen to have a spare £45,000 a year, it may be a good idea to cherish the mothers in your lives to prevent them running off with said plumber/milkman/tennis coach. It’s not only a nice thing to do, it makes sound financial sense.
