19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Face It: You Are Too Busy to Do Your Own Housework, September 19, 2000
This review is from: A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce: Why You Can Afford to Hire Help and How to Get It (Paperback)
This book is a management manual for evaluating whether to get household help or not, deciding what sort of help you need, hiring the help, and managing the relationship successfully. Although the subject is getting your housework done, the book is as carefully developed as any book I have read on workplace management in recent years. We need more books like this about how to get our 'home' work done!
The average woman in the United States has a full-time job requiring more than 40 hours a week of effort and a commute. Then she comes home and does another 25-35 hours of housework. Her husband (if she has one) usually does a little, but rarely anything approximating half. That kind of a work week would be banned in the first job. Why do women suffer through it at home?
Ms. Sherman does a masterful job of describing all of the reasons why people do not hire household help, and then explains why those reasons are really based in stalled thinking.
For example, most people just want to save the money. Yet, if doing the housework makes your life miserable, what good is the money? If you are a man, your wife may grow to resent your not doing the housework so much that you'll have to do 20 hours a week also . . . and have an angry wife. Angry wives are a leading cause of divorce, and that is much more expensive than household help. Ms. Sherman also goes on to aid you in thinking through how you might economize in other areas, and also increase your income. One of my favorite stories from the book is the woman who does housecleaning who hires a housekeeper to do her own home! So more people can afford housekeepers on a part-time basis than think they can.
A lot of people don't want to bring this up with their spouse. The book has some excellent suggestions for getting male cooperation and enthusiasm for adding a housekeeper.
Here is how the book is organized:
Part I -- Making the Decision to Hire a Housekeeper
1. Size of the housekeeping work and costs of not hiring it done.
2. Overcoming common misconceptions about why people avoid hiring housekeepers.
3. Create objectives for what you would use the increased time for, such as spending more time with your children and spouse.
4. Evaluate the issue like a manager would.
5. Plan what you need.
6. Calculate costs and benefits of alternative solutions.
Part II -- Hiring and Managing a Housekeeper
7. Create household systems to simplify the tasks.
8. Decide what benefits to offer the housekeeper.
9. Attracting and selecting the right person.
10. How to fulfill your legal obligations towards the government.
11. How to manage the relationship with your housekeeper.
12. Communicating with and replacing your housekeeper.
There is also an appendix with model instructions for a housekeeper, and another with recipes that are easy for a housekeeper to use. The author also offers resources on important subjects to supplement what she has in the book.
I also evaluated this book in terms of our experience with housekeepers. I think this book would have helped my wife and I realize that we needed a housekeeper sooner than we did. We probably hung on with employing nannies too long. The advice mirrors what we do with our housekeeper, and we have had a good experience. So it looks like good stuff to me.
An unexpected benefit is that the rest of the family will do more housework after you get a housekeeper. That happened in our home, too. Yes, I do more housework now, also.
After you have read this book, ask yourself where else you may have misconceptions about concerning how you spend your time. Could you get other services done for you, as well? Men might enjoy having someone shovel the snow or trim the hedges.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Helps you sort through emotion and logic, September 19, 2001
This review is from: A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce: Why You Can Afford to Hire Help and How to Get It (Paperback)
The thought of hiring someone to help in the house brought up a swirling mixture of emotions, making it hard to logically decide if household help was right for me. Besides covering all the how-to issues of placing ads, interviewing, training, and paying taxes, in her book Kathy helps readers sort out the emotional side of deciding to hire household help. In summation, if we are willing to buy a meal from a fast food chain that pays its workers a bit above minimum wage, why not pay someone to cook a meal for us in our own kitchen (at a higher hourly wage)? Ditto for paying for laundry services, a grocery store that picks out our food, or a babysitter to watch the kids while we do chores. Because I am a married woman without kids, I initially decided to hire a cleaning service to come once a month instead of hiring my own part-time employee. But when my husband ruptured his Achilles' tendon, leading to three successive casts and rehabilitation, my work activities as a self-employed writer and real estate investor came to a crashing halt. Much of my time was spent doing his share of the chores plus taking care of his new needs. I reread Kathy's book, placed an ad in the local college newspaper, and received three calls a day until I canceled the ad early (I decided it was worth it to offer $11 per hour to get the best applicants I could afford). The mature student I hired has worked in the past for a cleaning service, is more of a neatnik than I am, and is a talented cook! Even after my husband's leg heals, I suspect we are going to continue hiring part-time help. It is absolutely wonderful to leave my computer and walk upstairs into a clean house with fresh baked cookies cooling on the counter! For us, it is worth it to economize in other areas (our newest car is 8 years old) in order to afford household help. I'm glad Kathy wrote this book because it helped us make a decision that worked for us.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Considering Hiring Household Help? Youll Need This Book !!, September 30, 2000
This review is from: A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce: Why You Can Afford to Hire Help and How to Get It (Paperback)
This super 253 page, brand new book is a MUST if you think you need household help, (or even if you think you can get along without it). It'll give you all of the answers to the questions about this, to help you make an intelligent decision. You'll learn why hiring household help is no longer a luxury for the wealthy, but should be viewed as a time-management tool for busy folks. The volume is an easy read, loaded with important facts. You'll learn how to justify the cost and even how to sell the idea to your spouse !! There's a great appendix that provides a super schedule with day by day duties you can give to your helper so you can get the biggest bang for your buck. This schedule alone would take you much time and effort to prepare. There's even info on how to comply with the "nanny tax" laws. If you're just tired of complaining about your housework, and all of the daily chores that must be done, GET THIS BOOK. IT CAN REALLY HELP !!
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