I recently talked with a reader who used to work as a household manager for a rich family — a job I have always wanted to hear the logistics of. Here’s our conversation.
How did you end up in this job?
I was working as a nanny, but I was already in a place where I knew I was ready to move forward. I couldn’t really afford the next step. There was a training program for parent coaching I wanted to do, but it was linked to a graduate program at a university and priced accordingly, so seriously far out of my budget without taking on loans and that felt too risky.
The family I was working with wasn’t a great personality match and I was already casually looking for another job. I had a profile up on some nanny search website and a woman reached out and asked if I’d sit down and hear her out about a nanny-adjacent job she thought I’d be a good match for, which turned out to be a household manager job. On paper, the details of the job were great — big pay increase, health insurance, company car, retirement savings. I knew immediately that this person was going to be an absolute nightmare to work for, but I also knew if I could tough it out for a year, I could save up enough to pay for my coaching course outright and I was willing to make that trade.
What did the job entail?
My official title was household manager, but the role was really more of a hybrid house manager (manage staff, inventory, event planning) and personal assistant (personal errands, email inbox management), with lots of personal errands that they didn’t want to ask the housekeepers to do.
I managed a full-time staff of three and part-time staff of between 3-6, depending on the season, across three properties (one main home, one seasonal home where the entire household moved for part of the year, and one vacation home). This included housekeeping, cooking, and child care staff. I was only responsible for interior duties/staff. I had a counterpart who managed the exterior duties/staff (and the pets, hunting gear and the wine collection).
I was a salaried employee with health insurance, 401k match and a “company” car.
My daily duties were a walk-through when I got there in the morning, and before I left, basically making sure the house always looked perfect, like people didn’t live there. I opened and sorted the mail, kept an eye on one boss’s email, and made sure the housekeepers had what they needed to keep the house running. I was in charge of the staff and family credit cards, checking for fraud, I guess? So once a month, sorting through eight people’s worth of receipts, making sure everything lined up. The housekeepers did the grocery shopping, but it was my job to oversee the lists, and I did most of the rest of the household shopping — clothes, gifts, etc. I did all the hiring and scheduling for an ever rotating list of babysitters, lots of travel planning and booking things, and sometimes I would travel with the family so if they needed anything while there, they could delegate. I did pretty regular event planning — holidays, and big dinners with visiting scholars, politicians, etc. They were the kind of uber wealthy where they sat on the boards of several major nonprofits and were pretty heavily involved in the behind-the-scenes stuff that happens in politics at that financial level.
In practice my job was like 90% errands, internet shopping and what I can only describe as ADHD side quests — someone would say, “Oh, I heard this bakery across the state sells the best croissants” so I’d drive four hours to buy some, or “oh, camping sounds fun” so I’d be responsible for finding the best campground in the area, researching and buying all the best gear for X number people for X nights in the current weather, packing it all and leaving a map and their reservations printed out on the seat of their car (my “exterior” counterpart would be concurrently making sure the cars were ready — washing, gassing, loading the cars for me and also pulling wine for the trip), or “we want to try a gluten-free diet now, please replace everything in the pantry with similar gluten-free options by the end of the week.”
The most absurd food request was I had to transport three yogurts to another country. The family was on vacation in a foreign country known for its high-quality dairy products. I got a call from my boss asking me to bring three yogurts from the fridge, and I actually laughed, I thought it was a joke. It was not. I had to figure out how to pack and keep cool individual yogurts over three connecting flights and through customs in two different countries.
How did you transport the yogurts?
Okay, I was actually super proud of this. The yogurts were 4 oz and weren’t going to fit in a quart Ziplock anyway, so I had to keep them cold and un-crushed in my checked bag. The other limiting factor was that I have that kind of vague ethnic look that people tend to project their assumptions/prejudices onto and in an airport that looks like being “randomly” pulled out of line for an extra search, and then finding one of those little love notes from TSA inside my checked bags about how they also “randomly” selected my bags for an extra search. So random! This meant I needed to pack this in a way that wouldn’t get pulled apart and ruined by some overzealous agents. I was afraid an actual cooler would look too weird on an X-ray, so I bought a bunch of soft pearl ice packs, like the kind you use if you hurt yourself, and a big, clear Tupperware container. I put the yogurts in a large Ziplock and sealed it shut with tape, in case the pressure change exploded them. I put that in the Tupperware (to add structure to keep them from smashing) with Ziplocks of ice (so it would mold around the yogurts more completely). My hope was that if the TSA agents could easily open the package and see that it was really just yogurt, they’d leave it alone. I wrapped the Tupperware in a beach towel layered with the pearl ice packs and put it in the center of my suitcase, so that it would be as insulated as possible, both for temperature control and so they wouldn’t get smashed. I hand-wrote a note for TSA explaining that my boss was completely unreasonable and I would likely be fired if I showed up without this yogurt so please don’t throw them away, and please re-wrap them after you’ve decided they are, in fact, yogurt.
TSA did an extremely half assed job re-wrapping them, but it was enough to keep them cool and only partially smooshed (but not broken!). When I triumphantly handed over the yogurts, he was like, “Oh, I forgot I asked you to bring these,” and then didn’t eat them.
That’s amazing. Can you share any other ridiculous/over-the-top things you found yourself doing?
Gosh, so many. I think the yogurt was the most absurd, but the camping, pantry and long-distance bread pickup are all real scenarios. My boss once decided at the last minute she didn’t want to sit on the planning committee for a major fundraising gala, and sent me instead. That one was actually really fun. Lots of weird little stuff, like having a toy thrown on my desk that they picked up on vacation and being instructed to track it down in every color, every permutation it comes in because the kid liked it and now they need ALL OF THEM. Or I’d find a stack of catalogues on my desk and have to leaf through page by page to find all the circled items to order.
What did you like most about it? Dislike most?
In the beginning, the novelty of how chaotic it was made it interesting. I love problem solving and having lots of variety in my day. Turns out I also like hiring and am really good at it for household staffing, after being on the opposite end of it for so long. It’s something I still do for my clients now, helping them hire nannies and housekeepers. I have a good eye for if personalities will mesh well in close quarters, something people do not put enough weight on when hiring inside their house. I really liked most of my staff, I definitely stayed longer than I should have, for them.
The worst part was hands down my bosses. Once you get to the top few percent of income, you likely haven’t heard the word “no” in years and it shows. There’s a level of wealth that I think warps the realities of even once-kind people. It was easily the most erratic, toxic work environment I’ve ever been a part of. You talk all the time about how a toxic enough work environment can really warp your sense of what’s “normal” and seep into your regular life and that’s so true. I think I have a clearer understanding of how people get stuck in abusive relationships now. After a long day of screaming at me, my boss would be like, “Oh, today was rough, get yourself the nicest flowers you can find, on me, tonight” and then have left jewelry on my desk in the morning, but if it took me more than a half hour to send a thank-you email, she was back in my office berating me for being an ingrate.
By the end, it was really starting to affect my health and I realized I was only staying to shield the rest of the staff from the worst of our bosses’ behavior. I knew I needed to get out before things got worse.
What were your hours typically like?
In theory, I worked 9-5 — I was salaried and “some weeks you’ll work 50 hours, some weeks you’ll work 30” lol. In reality, my bosses were boundary tramplers so my actual schedule was all over the place, I never worked only 40 hours. My boss called my work phone and sent texts and emails that they expected responses to at all hours. If I was lucky, I was able to shove a quick snack in my face at my desk, but if the family was home I never got a real lunch break because my boss could not handle seeing anyone sitting down and not looking busy. If a babysitter called in sick, that was now my job to stay through until the parents returned. If there was an event, I was there 12 hours in the days leading up to it and 18 hours the day of. My vacation days were purely theoretical. The housekeepers could take time off, because I could hire a temporary replacement to do extra cleanings while they were gone, but not me. It wasn’t even strongly discouraged, but explicitly “no one else can do your job and you can’t leave her (my boss) unsupported like that.”
What surprised you most about the job?
I don’t think I realized that this was less a structured job and more they were essentially paying me to be on call. I definitely did not have 40+ hours of real work to do, I was just expected to be there in case anyone wanted anything. This was especially true for travel, I’m still shocked someone was willing to fly me all over the world just to guarantee I would drive out and grab their paper every morning on vacation, and be on call to, like, run up to the pharmacy if someone ran out of sunscreen.
I’ve always thought that if I ever became fabulously rich, I wouldn’t want household staff because I value privacy and solitude too much! Can you talk about that a little — how did that work, with people living their private lives alongside paid staff? Did they just give up a certain amount of privacy? Pretend staff weren’t there? Something else? And how did you get comfortable with that on your end?
I’ve spent my entire career inside other people’s homes. I started babysitting when I was 11 and have done work in this realm ever since. It would probably be a really weird transition to this work as an adult, but I’ve been doing it for three-quarters of my life, and I can’t really imagine anything else. It helps that I am also an intensely private person, so the urge to pretend I never saw something to preserve someone else’s privacy is very strong. You know everything about people’s lives — you know what kind of marriage they have, how they treat their children, you know if they’re getting a divorce or having a baby before they tell their friends or family.
How this looks is so, so different just based on the kind of people you’re working for. For this family, there was such a clear delineation — we were staff. They would often pretend we weren’t there, and the expectation was definitely that we would make ourselves as invisible as possible. We were not allowed to call them by their first names, we were only allowed to use the staff bathroom, I was allowed to use the front stairs but the housekeepers were not. It was definitely my least comfortable job.
That being said, if I miraculously become that rich, I would definitely hire someone to help my family. If you’re paying someone a good living wage and treating them with respect, it is such a luxury to have someone around whose job it is to help you. But I had so many other good experiences as a nanny, so that colors my opinion. Two of the girls I used to care for were bridesmaids in my wedding and I’m still in touch with most of the families I worked for.
How long did you stay in that job?
About two years and I was the longest lasting person in that role. I think the previous record was 14 months and I’ve heard no one has lasted even a year since I left. Still unsure if that’s something I should be proud of!
Did you ever do this kind of work for another family afterwards, or was this a one-time thing?
It was a one-time thing. It gave me the funding I needed to do my coaching training and get my business off the ground without working another job to stay afloat. And because of how unpleasant the family was, the work itself was really … hollow. I like doing work that feels like I am helping people, like it matters. There was just no amount of volunteer work I could do on the side that felt like it came close to balancing out the fact that I was just facilitating rich babies behaving badly. I suspect a lot of what was the worst about this job was specific to these particular bosses, but I didn’t want to find out.
Tell us a bit about the work you’re doing now, with this behind you!
I work as a postpartum doula and parent coach now, and I have a really narrow specialty. I only work with disabled/high-risk and otherwise Covid-cautious families. As so much of the world “moves on,” a lot of families are really struggling to find connection and support from someone who will affirm their choices instead of minimizing their concerns. That means I do a lot of virtual work, and have a really comprehensive in-person safety policy requiring masking and testing.
I love my work. I genuinely enjoy supporting families and this work combines all my expertise of years of nannying, coaching, and being a mom and some skills I picked up as a household manager, like hiring. The household manager job helped me get here in a really obvious way, in that it literally paid for my coaching training, but also in a surprising way. While I was working for the family, I was running an errand to the head office of my boss’s company and I ran into an old friend in the lobby. They were someone I’d known since high school and always enjoyed spending time with (we’d actually even lived in a house together with friends in college) but had lost touch over the years. We made plans to get together and catch up. We’re married now and have three kids.
Without that job, I never would have reconnected with my partner and become a mom. I thought after all my years of childcare, having a baby would be easy but my postpartum phase was the most humbling experience of my life. It made me realize I wanted to refocus my work on families who had just had babies, and my amazing, supportive partner was the one who encouraged me to train and certify as a doula and shift my care model (in the middle of a pandemic!) and refocus on families like ours who need care and support from someone who is still serious about avoiding Covid. As awful as the job was, it put me on a path to something (and several someones!) I love very much, so I don’t regret my time there.