520 hours at $10k/year is only around $19/hour. This is minimum wage in some American cities like San Francisco, and fast-food starting salaries in many other large cities. You're simply not able to hire someone for bespoke meal prep, housecleaning and random errands for $19/hour in America - or if you can, they will either not be competent or move on quickly to higher paying jobs.

Having a housekeeping service come for an hour or so weekly and a lawn maintenance and snow clearing service every two weeks will cost around $10k a year total in many large or mid-size cities, and many upper middle class earners do in fact use those services.

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parpfish 17 hours ago | parent [-]

okay, so lets adjust the numbers in my quick example.

i'll pay $20k a year to get 10 hours back a week (i.e., you an engineer that goes from making (120/yr to 100/yr). that's still a valuable trade that i think a lot of people would take given the choice.

and the assist would then be getting 80k/yr if they do a fulltime 40 hours a week which places their compentation at the level of plenty of white-collar (non-tech) office jobs. and it doesn't require any special skills or equipment.

i can't imagine spending 10k for snow/landscaping work. i havent paid for lawn mowing, but when we had a snowplow guy he'd charge $50 per plow event (when snow got above a certain level).

	▲	iwanttocomment 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Didn't say that snow/lawn work was $10k/year, I indicated that was in addition to (more expensive, typically) housekeeping services. My point was that Americans very much hire household assistants, but they're specialized and on-premises for a short time to maximize value and minimize costs. In the past week, I've had housekeepers, lawn service, a plumber and a handyman at my house. They were all great, and did better work than I would do, but I wouldn't have any of those people do the jobs of any of the others. Why pay $20k to a generalist 10 hours a week when I can get specialists who can do more in less time? There just isn't a great need for non-specialized assistance at $20k/year. My housekeepers and lawn service are on auto-schedule and auto-pay, so they require a bare minimum of my time. I would have a hard time trusting a low-paid part-time personal assistant to facilitate and review plumbing and construction work beyond the most basic fixes. Think about a single renter with a small to medium size apartment. They don't need groundswork or maintenance, that's included in the rent. How much housekeeping do they need in a small to mid-size apartment? They often get grocery/food delivery and/or just microwave stuff. There are plenty of delivery laundry services or apartments with washer/dryers en suite. How many errands do they need to run that they don't need to be personally present for? You can't send an assistant to the DMV, after all. Think about dual high earners with kids. They're going to need child care, and that's going to take a huge bite of their income. They don't need a 10-hour-a-week assistant, they either need more than that at home (a nanny), or they're white-knuckling it to save for their kids' current or future school tuition. Think about a single-earner couple. One of the couple can stay home and take care of the kids and all of the things that an assistant could do. tl;dr: Americans absolutely hire human assistants, just not in the kind of generalist model you're thinking, because it's just not worth the kind of money it would take.
	▲	bruce511 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You're supposing that the salary cost is the only cost. That's not how it works. Firstly, are you offering this assistant Paid Time Off? Paid Sick Time? Are you making social security contributions? Health care contributions? Or do they need to do that? You're happy with 10 hours per week. So say 3 to 5 pm? Or would some of the tasks be time-of-day dependent? Would you be happy By the time you're paying a living wage, and all the extras are added in, it's costing more like 25 to 30k a year. Maybe some folk can afford that, but I'm guessing most can't. But what fo randos on the internet know? Find 3 mates. Pony up some cash. Hire a person. When it's working, find 4 more randos and hire another. This is how businesses start...
	▲	sema4hacker 17 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Note that in the USA there are typically three kinds of assistants: (1) they're an established business and you simply pay their quoted rates, in which case they don't net all that you pay them due to their overhead and IRS obligations, (2) they're classified as a "household employee" and the IRS wants both of you to cover extras like Social Security and Medicare, in which case their paycheck has deductions and you owe taxes to the IRS, or (3) you give them under-the-counter cash payments to avoid paying taxes, but that's illegal.