Customer Reviews

A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce: Why You Can Afford to Hire Help and How to Get It

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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.

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.

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 !!

A Housekeeper is Cheaper Than a Divorce copyright 2000, Debbie Williams

It's confession time: as organized as I am (it comes with the job), this professional organizer hates housework! In fact, most of my organizational skills come from my desire to contain the clutter so that I don't have to clean as frequently. I just have the luxury of not having to clean before the maid comes that many of the "organizationally challenged" are lacking in their lives. Ms. Sherman's book, A Housekeeper is Cheaper Than a Divorce, not only provides the tools for finding and keeping a good housekeeper, but also helps us determine whether or not we need domestic help and at what level.

Many time management and family counselors argue that husbands and wives should share housework 50/50, but as Ms. Sherman points out in the introduction of her book, that still places the burden of another part-time job on our significant other. This just splits the load, taking you both away from other tasks you'd rather be doing, such as having more leisure time or starting a home business. And if we hire a babysitter to watch the kids while we catch up on our cleaning chores or complete a work-from-home project, aren't we missing the point of raising our kids and helping them grow?

As a work-at-home mom, I see the pitfalls of trying to be Super Parent and do it all: work, home, kids, spouse, self. (Usually self doesn't even rate, because we're just too tired to pamper ourselves.) So it's not surprising to read that one survey found that "almost half of couples have fought about cleaning, and 1 in 10 has separated over housework disagreements." Wow, I guess we're not all by ourselves in this struggle, are we?

This book helps you weigh the pros and cons of hiring a housekeeper, maid service, or choosing the DIY (do it yourself) route and enlisting the help of your family. It's methodical, practical, and very thorough. Far from dry reading, however, this book provides you with checklists, planning guides, comparison charts, and other tools you need to effectively decide for yourself whether or not hiring domestic help is the right move for you and your family.

This book practically saved my marriage. We were both working full-time but then had another full-time job at home so we barely had time for our marriage. The housekeeper isn't that expensive after we analyzed things.

Another book that we got that really got our marriage back on track was -- The Romantic's Guide. It gave us hundreds of tips and ideas on things to do to get closer again. I'd highly recommend both.

After reading the book, I suggest that it should be a must-read for all the harried mothers of the western world - and for many harried fathers, as well. It tells us everything we need to know about how to effectively and safely delegate routine housework, and why that is often, if not usually, the best option.

All that, and it's wonderfully entertaining, too! The writing style is breezy with just the proper balance between statistics to prove the point and amusing anecdotes to drive the point home.

My favorite section is the historical analysis of how we got where we are - where women in our society shoulder the lion's share of homemaking tasks and think that a proper mother would never delegate the washing of clothes and the preparation of meals, but she will quite happily delegate the raising of her children - often while she washes their clothes and prepares their meals.

Read it and see if a light doesn't come on for you as it did for me.

I'm sold on the idea of getting household help, but many of my friends say they would rather do it on their own. Rather clean toilets than play golf? Rather mop the floor than spend time with their families? Hey, get your priorities straight.
A clean house creates a haven for you and your family, but it doesn't have to cost you all your free time. This book helps you understand the need for help in our over-scheduled lives and what can be traded to make it affordable.
The book is written in a straight-forward manner and really covers the topic well.
Here's a comment I found by the author on the Dollar Stretchers website: "Conflicts over housework are rapidly joining the 'big two' causes of arguments (sex and money) in two-career families. Household chores which include tasks like grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, ironing, daily tidy-up, and heavy cleaning average 35 hours a week in families with children, a burden that is borne disproportionately by women whether or not they work outside the home. After trying, and failing, to get their husbands to take on an equal share of this workload, women are paying the price through increased stress levels, loss of leisure time, and damage to their marriages because of rising levels of anger and resentment towards their spouses."

I ordered this book after hearing about it from a friend. What a concept! The book walked me through the process, from the thinking-it-through and rationalization phase, through and including the hiring of and benefits for phase!

The book was intriguing and humorous, and very helpful! Hats off to the author!

This book is truly revolutionary. Ms. Sherman clearly shows through anecdotes and statistics that couples everywhere are trying to split three full-time jobs - the husband's, the wife's, and the running of the house - between two people. It's just not possible.

The book is a comfort to anyone who has wondered why they feel overwhelmed because they can't keep up with the household tasks. The logic and benefits, as well as the guidelines, to hiring household help are clearly spelled out. The book is a wonderful reference tool.

In A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than A Divorce: Why You Can Afford To Hire Help And How To Get It, Kathy Sherman presents a practical, real-world technique for alleviating domestic stress -- the acquisition of housekeeping services. Sherman shows that hiring help can be both an effective time-management tool and an economic advantage for the family. By rearranging the family budget to hire housekeeping help, busy women will be enabled to earn more income, continue their education, start a business, enjoy relationships with spouse, children, family and friends; exercise, pursue hobbies; perform volunteer work; get need sleep, and just spend time on any number of more interesting and fulfilling pursuits. A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than A Divorce is "must" reading for every harried and time-stressed homemaker -- and their husbands too!