Who Says You Can't Afford an Au Pair

What do you do when you have children but your budget doesn't quite stretch far enough for one of you to take time away from work to look after the children.

Well one option could be to hire in an Au pair to look after your children while you go back to work and earn the money to keep you all afloat in the tough financial climate that we currently find ourselves in. If you decide to hire in an Au pair then you could end up making significant savings over putting your children into day care nurseries.

For a start the money that you pay to an Au pair would be significantly less than paying for day care, as the wages of the Au pair are part subsidised by the fact that they obtain free accommodation, this of course does come at a certain cost to you as your food bills and or water/electricity bills might increase, but that increase should still be significantly less than sending your child to day nursery.

Of course what you can expect in return for that hospitality is complete private care for your children.

Obviously if you put your children in to a day nursery then they will interact with other children, but by interacting with their own personal nanny they should still achieve all the beneficial social interactivity skills.
People who claim that they can't afford to have a live in nanny or au pair usually haven't taken the time to see the monthly cost implementation of having a live in nanny.
I actually had a friend who literally was spending every spare penny they had sending their child to day nursery.

One of their wages was paying the mortgage and being used to pay the bills and buy food, while the second wage was being used to fund the nursery costs.
When I pointed out it would probably be just as beneficial for one of the parents to stay home and care for the child they both looked at me like I had spawned a second head.

Apparently it wasn't necessarily all about the cost implications, but also about the fact that they were both career driven.
The fact is it doesn't matter whether you have to go back to work because you have to or because you want to, you would still be financially better off with an au pair than sending your child to a nursery.