how much child support do you pay?
Mary
22 years ago
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mariealways
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agolovehadley
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoRelated Discussions
how much do you pay for childcare?
Comments (9)Since you wanted the "fair market value" of child care.... Because you have your own kids, I would equate your situation to an in-home day care and not to a nanny in the home of the cared-for child. My 4 1/2 year child is at a Montessori preschool/day care for four days a week. This costs $1040 per month. I also had my older son at a different preschool/day care when he was 4. That school costs $679 per month for full time (4 to 5 days a week). The teachers and the curriculum were not as good at the previous school, and we did not return. As you can see, there is a significant variability of the cost even in the same city. BTW, when we had a full time nanny at our house without a child of her own, she charged $15.00 per hour plus benefits and taxes for two kids. (This is the going rate in our city.) She came to our house, fed them, dressed them, cared for the kids laundry, and did some cooking and cleaning. I know a neighbhor that pays $10.00 per hour under the table. I do not think your sister is getting quite this degree of service since you are NOT at her house where she can run out with the breakfast dishes on the table with the child still sleeping, which is what we did. I do not have any personal experience with in-home day care. What I would do is to find out how much the in-home day care cost in your geographic area and charge about that much. However, you also need to consider that your sister will not be able to deduct the child care credit, which is up to $5000.00 per year per family, unless you declare the amount she pays you in YOUR income. Most child care centers will charge a stiff penalty for late pick up because the staff needs to get home. Many charge $1.00 per minute in our city. Hope these numbers help....See MoreHow much do you pay for utilities?
Comments (70)cynic: Someone else mentioned the position of the heating elements in an electric water heater in explaining why the lower water temp at the bottom, where the cold water inlet is, can encourage bacteria growth. Perhaps electric tank design will change to a bottom-heating element as in gas heaters to address the bacteria growth issue? I can't help but wonder if there's more contaminants in our water today that is making this a problem now, or if it always existed but we simply didn't know about it? It seems like if this involved an automobile manufacturer, there would be a recall. There was a period when electricity rates were much lower and in low-demand situations (like mine), an electric heater cost less to operate than a gas model. This is because electricity is 100% efficient when used for heating purposes. Standby heat losses with an electric water heater are also much less than a gas model because it can be totally encapsulated with insulation where a gas heater requires exposure of the bottom surface for the flame to transfer heat to the water. A gas water heater loses some heat to room air from the flame and the exhaust as it is piped outdoors. This is "free" heat in the winter, but it increases the air conditioning load in the summer. The difference in cost per energy unit of gas vs electricity has widened considerably over the last thirty years. In fact, natural gas prices in my area have recently declined, while electricity rates have continued to soar. The electric water heater is the original one installed by the builder thirty years ago and it is still functioning problem-free. I know of several homeowners who have conventional gas water heaters that required replacement three times during this period. Tankless on-demand water heaters sound good in theory, but they don't achieve the energy savings originally claimed by manufacturers. In fact, those claims had to be modified in point-of-sale displays. Reliability issues and high repair costs merely add to their high initial purchase price. I closely monitor my energy consumption and utility bills (as you might have guessed). I have all my utility bills filed from when I purchased the house in 1986. A new rotary compressor refrigerator and an LED TV take credit for some of the reduction in hydro use. While electricity consumption has decreased, but the bills have not. If it weren't for all the extra fees, charges and taxes, the monthly bill would be closer to the $20/month I paid in 1986 and not the $50/month bill I receive today. On the brighter side, my phone bill dropped $10/month to $15 when I switched from a dial-up landline to a pre-pay voice only monthly cell phone. I have a roof antenna that receives 42 off-air TV signals, but what I save not paying for cable I pay for Internet (which didn't exist thirty years ago.) Water/sewer used to be flat-rate in the good ol'days with no restriction on consumption. Property taxes however, have increased far more than any utility where I am located. We used to be a small, efficiently-run town that amalgamated with a much larger city. My property taxes have increased from $2,000/year in 1986 to $10,000 this year (which doesn't include a huge increase in water rates). Policing, fire, social services, schools, garbage collection and public transit are responsible for most of the increase. There's also been some extremely wasteful spending/mismanagement reported by the local newspaper. Bigger is definitely not better, or more efficient, in this case!...See MoreHow much do you pay for internet?
Comments (34)I am running DSL by AT&T over a phone line for $30 additional per month. Up to 10 email accounts are permitted and it is possible to run multiple devices on the gateway ( a gateway does the job of a modem and router.) The speed probably does not compare to roadrunner over a cable, but it is respectable and is many times faster than dialup. I made good use of this service since my adult son had to temporarily move in while he was between jobs. It was no problem to add an email account for him and connect his computer via USB port radio link. He made good use of it for job hunting. (He's moving out tomorrow.) We are back to my desktop and two laptops. One laptop is used only occasionally. This system has been reliable. The gateway (att provided) has run a year without a problem. The only problem I've encountered is that the system slows down between the hours of 3 pm to 6:30 pm. The service is really Yahoo! as sold through AT&T. I do not like the default home page, but have it set up for two home pages on a pair of tabs. I continue to use my old home page for roaming the net because it is less cluttered. A simple click on the ATT tab takes me home to the email service and other features. My total phone bill with internet runs $55 to $60 per month. I dropped my old dialup at $220 per year and my wife dropped her dialup at $19 per month, and I dropped the second phone line at about $30 per month....See MoreRE: new movies, how much do you pay for tickets at the theater?
Comments (36)Snidely, perhaps I did not clarify my thoughts well enough. I submit that exorbitant pricing, for an inferior product, is a form of immorality. The demand for the type of entertainment created by the film industry is a very shallow form of hero worship. It is manufactured and driven by purposefully-perpetrated cultural cues from a powerful Public Relations empire. An entire era of humans shammed into commercialized hype. It is the power of peer pressure used to enrich a few - to the unconscionable cost of many. If the industry produced entertainment at a reasonable cost, then consumption of the product could be considered a fair exchange. However, aside from the type of mass marketing I described above, and the natural mechanisms relating to assimilation to the group most often felt by overly-trusting and unsophisticated youth who are too immature to have well-developed capacities for good decision making, entertainment offered by 'movies' also includes the expectations of courtship. The entertainment industry panders to, and plays on, the weaknesses of human nature. Urges meant for the up-building acculturation of a the most vulnerable are funneled into financial profit for the most unscrupulous. You appear to be a very fitting example of this unscrupulousness. Above, you recommended that I financially profit off of activities that I condemn. Sorry, but no thank you sir....See Moremariealways
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