Hired Help

So, knowing I was about to be rendered too incapacitated to keep up with the labor around the Funny Farm and its north and south forties, I hired some workers to help out. We already had Gerardo, a worthy who relieves me from having to weed, trim, blower, dig, repair, and rake. The redoubtable Gerardo, the indispensable Gerardo. He drops by every couple of weeks, to the tune of $85/hit.

Now we have Luz, a cleaning lady, who also comes around every two weeks: $80 a hit; and Chris, a pool guy, who charges $80/month for once-a-week service. If and when I ever get well, am I going to keep these people on the payroll?

Well, of course, Gerardo will stay, come Hell or high water. But the cleaning lady? The pool guy?

Normally, I dislike hiring cleaning ladies, because they rarely do the job as well as I can and often break or otherwise dork things up. But Luz is an exception (well…not counting for the broken vacuum cleaner and the dislocated the shower doors…). She really is very, very good, and in fact does a better job than I can do. Her efforts, which are considerable, make it possible for me to invite friends to dinner without having to knock myself out cleaning house before they arrive. Overall, she makes my house a much more pleasant place to live…simply because I hate cleaning and put it off until the place is such a rat’s nest that I’m forced to shovel it out.

Do I need Luz? Or rather, will I still need her once I’m back on my feet?

Probably not.

As for Chris: what’s happening there is I’m paying a guy to come once a week to do a job that needs to be done every day. Effectively he relieves me of one day a week of work. On the other hand, when monsoons are not storming, the pool water will self-maintain for several days; if he does the heavy lifting when he shows up on Wednesdays (make that “if he shows up”), the rest is pretty easy for me. And it must be allowed that he finally succeeded in beating back the mustard algae, which took to coating the walls along about the middle of last winter and, once the weather warmed, turned the pool into a mossy fish pond.

However, in November I’ll drain and refill the pool, and once that job’s done, it’ll be very, very easy to maintain the system algae-free. Chris will become majorly redundant.

So: Luz in, Luz out?

I incline to want to keep Luz around. It is almost impossible to find a truly competent cleaning lady, and this one is competent in spades. Luz is the best cleaning lady to cross my path in 35 or 40 years, and on top of that, she’s an extremely nice person, very comfortable to have around. Letting her go could be the height of lunacy.

Okay, so we’ll think about Luz. Now, Chris in, Chris out?

Well, it is nice not to have to stay on top of the swimming pool every living breathing day. On the other hand, $80/month is $20 a week for about 10 minutes of Chris’s time. He ghosts in and out of here so fast that if I’m not actually outdoors when he slides through the side gate, I miss seeing him.  But…if I’m right that the present horror show will resolve along about the middle of December, if I let Chris go I’ll be firing him at Christmastime!!!

Augh.

There’s another way of looking at this: not over the short term (I’ll only need these people until I recuperate) but over the long term (as age advances any recuperation will reverse itself and I’ll again need help to take care of the place).

I like my house and my neighborhood. They’re pretty much perfect for me, especially given that the house is paid off. So much do I like the house and the ’hood that my goal is to age in place. Ideally, I would like to get old here and die here.

To make that happen, I will need someone to help keep the house habitable and someone to deal with the pool (unless I have the pool filled in or covered). When that happens, I’m going to have to pay their wages out of my monthly cash flow. And $ 170/month for Gerardo plus $160 for Luz plus $80 for Chris comes to $410 a month.

Maybe it would be good to make myself accustomed to having to carve that much out of the monthly budget now, rather than having to struggle with it when I’m older, even less able to think clearly than I am now, and probably sick. At this point it would be fairly easy to adjust to the required belt-tightening; in ten years or so, that could be more difficult. If I hang onto this bunch, the staff will be in place and the budget will be in place when the need arises.

On the other hand…one could simply take Luz and Chris’s pay — $ 240/month — and stick it in a rainy-day account, to be used to hire people sometime in the future. If I don’t need the extra help until I’m, say, 80, then such a fund would contain enough to hire maintenance people until I’m 90. And if I’m lucky, I’ll croak over before then.

{chortle!} I don’t know. Gerardo is not going. But as for the other two: it feels like a silly extravagance to hire a housecleaner and a pool guy to do work I can and should do myself. Yet it’s nice. It’s so very nice to have someone else doing this stuff. They may be worth the cost…