re: burnout
I am in a fairly happy place right now because I have a 7:30-4:30 day, sometimes shorter, and my clients are all either teachers or flexible sahms. They are the kind of families where the parent who goes to work later drops the child off and the parent who gets off earliest picks the child up so the child has an 8 hour day in childcare instead of a 10 hour one.
I am able to take summers off and school holidays, and that makes life really doable right now. (I get paid for the school holidays, but not for the summers) Would a niche like this work for you, holidaymama?
I used to do after school care and go till 6 or 7 pm, but I just don't have it in me. It is like working a second shift after the first one, with a fresh group of children arriving, a fresh set of needs to meet. I thought it would work out because my dd was school age and she'd have playmates, but too much for me.
I know a few providers in my area who specialize in part-time. They take every Friday off, for example, and they get the families where the little one can go to Grandma's one day a week but Grandma doesn't want to make the commitment to do childcare full-time. Or they are open MWF, say, and are able to find clients who only need part-time hours and are happy not to have to pay for full-time care -- here most daycares pretty much laugh at you if you say you only need part-time and could you share a space with someone ? I've always wondered if I could do a mornings only home daycare, say 7 am to 1pm and have all the children go home to nap? Maybe students or wahms would like that, because they wouldn't have to pay for naptime care when they could have their littles nap at home and get work done anyway.
My impression of the States is that you are a nation of workaholics, frankly. Long commutes, short maternity leaves, lots of overtime, people who don't take even the two weeks vacation they are supposed to get... I just don't know how y'all do it
. I can see why American childcare providers would feel that they are stuck with even longer hours than their employers. But would there be no niches for part-time care providers?
re: home daycare expenses
I calculate that my utilities etc. go up by about a third when my daycare is in session.
I have a cell phone and laptop that are mostly for business use --need that laptop to keep records, maintain my website, and to be able to do research and answer business emails during naptime and still keep an eye on the children.
Don't have a food program here. I buy organic where possible and budget about $6-8 per child per day for food. Recently increased my fees to cover a switch to organic milk/eggs/cheese and meat -- parents were happy to pay more for the good stuff. Food is my biggest expense. I try not to waste what we buy.
I buy way too much in the way of craft supplies. Like big bins of foamy letters that the kids use for a bit then are bored with them so they sit in my storage room and I forget I have them and buy another bin the next year....If I had the guts, I'd get rid of EVERYTHING and start over and be more careful with purchases.
Liability insurance is an issue, extra car insurance if you transport children, and supplying one's own carseats avoids a lot of hassles if you do...
Safety upgrades, like fire extinquishers, smoke/co2 detectors, baby gates, etc. can add up. My agency did a safety check in my home and gave me a list of stuff to take care of when I started with them. I did some other things for aesthetics as well as safety, like replacing all the old electric socket plates in our house with nicer, childproof ones.
Playpens, nap mats, child-sized furniture, strollers, wagons, quality toys, children's books, play climbers, etc. can add up but if you buy good quality and/or luck out to find good deals second hand, this is just a startup cost and you won't have to shell out every year after the first.
The best deal I have is my $12 library card. I usually have dozens of children's books, audiobooks, and music cds out at any one time. It took me a while to get over the fear of having to pay for lost/damaged materials, but then I realized that even if I had to replace a hundred dollars worth or so every year, the library card was STILL a really, really great deal. And I'm sure my librarians are just happy that their children's collection is being so well used and loved at my house.
I would love to have a cleaning service every couple of weeks, at least, but I haven't been able to convince myself I can afford that.
I am able to write off a lot of household expenses that we might have anyway. Like, we put a container garden system in our yard to do square foot gardening a couple of years ago, something I've always wanted to do. I was able to write off a big portion of that as a business expense because I planned to use gardening as an activity with the children and to grow food for their use. I can also write off a portion of my mortgage interest, home insurance, home repair expenses or rent representing the portion of my home used for business (works out to about a third) and the replacement cost of anything children destroy. I can write off a lot of expenses related to education and training, too, and some of that is for things I'd want to do anyway.
Don't know if it all works the same way with the IRS, but basically I find that here it is all the potential write-offs that make doing home daycare financially worth it.
