Yet again, the opportunity arises for me to hire a maid. An acquaintance is leaving town and is trying to help his maid find a replacement customer. Will it be me?
I am on the fence when it comes to having someone clean for me. I actually enjoy cleaning and I like a sparkling house. However, looking around, I can see that doing the cleaning and achieving a sparkling house is not high on my To Do list. Vacuuming, dusting...there is always tomorrow, right?
So in that regard, having a maid would be good for me and the house. But paying for something I can do myself and have time to do...difficult to justify. Worrying about legalities of visa and tax issues (possibly in two countries)...a bit scary.
Pros
The house would be clean at least once a week
I would be motivated to tidy the untidy parts before the maid came in
I would be directly helping someone earn a living
I could stop feeling guilty about not cleaning frequently enough
The apartment would be more pleasant to live in
Cons
It is expensive to hire someone to perform a service I could do myself
I don't understand the possible visa and tax issues in Japan
I don't know if hiring help here has any impact on my US taxes
Lots of "I think my cleaner steals from me" stories told among my acquaintances
I'm uncertain about how to interact with domestic help...
Neither list seems obviously stronger to me. What would/do you do?
You seem to have a creative bent, and some creative friends. Perhaps you could form a circle of people who don't have any cleaning issues and make a date to clean and create at/with one another's places and stuff on a semi-regular basis.
:-)
Why does tax or visa come in to it at all? I'm not really understanding this particular Con.
Here in Australia, if I hire someone to come and clean my little flat, it's a simple exchange of money for services. I do not declare it on my tax unless the cleaner is somehow cleaning my business premises.
If the cleaner is here on a visa, then it is up to them to ensure they are not working illegally. I can always ask. But then I would never hire a cleaner that wasn't a perm resident or temp resident anyway.
I've had cleaners before and love their work. They lift things, clean under and around them, then put the things back exactly as they were.
I only ever saw them to pay them, the rest of the time they had a key :)
Natalie: In the US, some people who hire maids directly can get in big trouble for not deducting/paying employment and social insurance taxes. And apparently many people working as maids in the US do not have work visas - and it is an employer's responsibility to check. Whether all that applies here in Japan, I'm not sure.
Since I am home doing things most of the time, I will very likely be here when the maid is here. How to stay out of her way, or to be appropriately in it, is something I would have to figure out.
JB: Maybe I should get some of my creative friends to clean with, but we'd probably make more mess than we cleaned!
Usually what would happen in Australia is that you would contract a Cleaning Service to supply a cleaner. The cleaner is an employee of the Service company not of you. Only if you were hiring a maid directly to work for you, usually full time, would you become an employer.
There are many advantages to hiring through an agency but you should check what legal requirements there are for for background checks. Here they would have to have a police check on the person they were going to send to you but that may not be the case everywhere. If something is stolen or broken then you could make a claim against the agency's professional indemnity insurance. And if your regular cleaner is ill or unavailable then they should provide a replacement.
Rather than a regular service you might just want an arrangement where you can call up a cleaner on short notice when you are in sleeping-at-work mode.
Is there a chance of having another series of major deadlines like you did so recently? It would have been lovely to have come home to a clean house then.
Maybe try it out for a trial period of a month and see how you feel about it then.
Sheryl and I have used a cleaning lady for some time. It really came down to a decision of making the best use of our time. Cleaning could be outsourced and relieved us of the hassle of doing it. We still tidy up before the maid comes so the house is clean for a few days at least :-)
A great cleaning person leaves the home clean and smelling great. It's one less thing on your actions list (you should check out Getting Things Done by David Allen). It frees up your schedule quite a bit on the weekend for other more fun projects. You can still get stress relief out of cooking.
I think the major hurdle that we had to overcome was the guilt factor. Our parents never had a cleaning person. Which family members would comment behind our backs (or to our faces) about it? Were we becoming snooty? Once we decided most of that didn't matter it made our mental anguish vanish and we signed up with a service. These days we use the aunt of a co-worker.
There are some maid services in Japan, but they are not as prevalent as in the US and elsewhere. Duskin's "Merry Maids" comes to mind. According to their website, they have a housekeeping service (vacuuming and dusting) that is about $220/week. If you want the kitchen/toilet/bath done, add another $240. Or you can hire a Merry Maid to come help you with various housekeeping and domestic tasks for $85 for 2 hours. Maybe that would work.
We had maid service a couple times in our life and it was wonderful. You get to choose what you want them to do or concentrate on. For example, my wife and I didn't clean our bathrooms for months/years because we had someone else do it. They usually did it better that we would. One of our cleaners always fluffed up the couches - something we never get around to doing. It was wonderful. The downside I found is what Ed said - the guilt factor. When something wasn't done to my satisfaction, I had a very hard time complaining. After all, I didn't want to seem like the boss and them "the help" although that's exactly what the relationship was. I can't speak for visa issues etc. in Japan - we just paid cash. And remember - it's for the cleaner to stay out of your way - not the other way around.
Bottom line, if you have the cash, I'd recommend it. It allows concentration on other things.
The only tax issue in Japan is if you wanted to deduct from from your tax, which you could do if you are working from home.
Otherwise 'baito' falls through the cracks (unless you are a business employing fulltime 'baito')
For businesses the letter of the law is 10% withholding tax.
But not writing down a full address is the way that companies keep it uncheckable.
Don't worry about tax.
Visa? Well let's hope they have a valid visa -I don't check. But if you are not the sponsor or main employer, you shouldn't get in trouble.
It is the best money I spend. I personally hate cleaning and ironing and see it as a pointless exercise in futility. Tasks that get done that need to get done again and again without any progress. I would rather spend my energy on improvements. But that is just me.
I am rarely at home when the cleaner comes to our place. I just leave the cash out and we leave little notes for each other. eg please clean windows today. She leaves notes to remind us to buy more cleaning products.
If I am there I try to be chatty and ask about her family etc. But otherwise I am just myself in the house if she is there.
and ps. this is a cash transaction as far as I am concerned. They organise their own taxes and visas. Most of the cleaners here have a main sponsor for their visa etc and they just take extra work on the side to suppliment their incomes which is usually sent straight back to their home country - usually the Philipines.
Foreign workers sending back cash is an essential part of the Philipine economy. I think it is around the second highest contributor to the GDP or some other such crazy statistic.
We had someone clean our house every two weeks for a few years. In general, it was nice.
It was every two weeks that she came, so we still had to do some housework. No, she didn't do everything perfectly, but she did everything OK. Yes, we did need to declutter the floor and counters the night before she came. We never thought she was stealing from us.
She quit a couple of years ago when a baby was getting close, and we haven't found a new housecleaner. My wife travels a lot for business, sometimes for long periods (2-3 weeks). Sometimes I'll book a service to come and clean just before she gets home. Not because we let the place go to hell, but so it's cleaner than my daughter and I are going to get it and my wife won't feel obligated to clean up after a long trip.