The short version: You can hire someone to handle a surprising amount of daily life, from cleaning and cooking to travel planning and managing everyone else you’ve hired. The value depends on what actually leaves your calendar, how much supervision remains, and whether the full recurring cost fits your finances. Begin with a task you dislike and see what you get back. There will be opportunities to acquire a household payroll later.
My wife wanted to hire cleaners. I resisted for a long time.
We could clean the house ourselves. This was the central argument, and it was true. It had only one weakness: we would then have to clean the house ourselves.
I regarded this as fiscally responsible behavior. She had a different assessment of how we should spend Saturday.
I eventually agreed. After they had been coming for a while, I reached the annoying conclusion that she had been right. I wished we had hired them years earlier.
The cleaners returned part of the weekend and eliminated a recurring negotiation over who would clean what and when. We could afford the service. I had been defending our right to spend free time doing something neither of us particularly wanted to do.
I’ll go from basic to extravagant, using personal experience, clients’ experiences, and Google for ballpark U.S. costs. People pay much less or much more. If you’re determined to spend more, the market is usually willing to cooperate.
Prices were researched in September 2026; older examples are dated. Fees and salaries are labeled separately; employment costs come later.
Ask: What recurring task, decision, trip, or coordination burden leaves your plate? Include remembering and following up. Time estimates cover work you already do, minus instructions and supervision. Don’t add them together: the assistant, chef, and manager may all claim the same grocery run. You only get that hour back once.
Recover the weekend
1. Cleaners, then an executive housekeeper
A cleaner takes over bathrooms, floors, and dusting. The house will get dirty again, which is disappointing but does give the arrangement a certain predictability. An executive housekeeper oversees daily upkeep, linens, supplies, guest rooms, and other housekeeping staff. Someone else becomes professionally concerned about the state of the house.
Time back: Perhaps 2–4 hours per cleaning visit; 5–10 hours a week if daily upkeep leaves your list.
Budget: About $75–$250 per recurring visit. Oplu lists senior head-housekeeper salaries of $110,000–$160,000 annually. More rooms, delicate surfaces, guest turnover, and supervisory duties raise costs.
2. Laundry service, then a private laundress
Wash-and-fold removes sorting, loading, folding, and sometimes a laundromat trip. A laundress adds ironing, garment care, linens, and putting everything away. At some point, a wardrobe can require enough maintenance to suggest that the clothes have hired you. This restores the intended arrangement.
Time back: Roughly 1–3 active hours a week. Don’t count the afternoon the washing machine spends working without you.
Budget: Poplin starts at $1 a pound, with local rates and minimums. Morgan & Mallet lists dedicated laundress salaries of $60,000–$100,000 annually. Rush service, fine fabrics, and hand finishing increase costs.
3. Lawn care, then someone responsible for the grounds
Begin with mowing. Add leaves, flower beds, irrigation, and pruning. Eventually, you can hire a full-time gardener to maintain the hedge maze on the south lawn.
The hedge maze, naturally, has standards. Also, left to itself, it will gradually become a hedge. Maintaining the distinction is someone’s job.
Time back: Perhaps 3–6 hours weekly during the growing season for mowing and routine yard maintenance; substantially more for extensive gardens you maintain yourself.
Budget: Basic recurring lawn care runs around $100–$500 a month. Private gardeners earn $60,000–$110,000 annually, before equipment and supplies. Acreage, expertise, and the number of things expected to remain alive drive costs.
4. Dog walkers, pet sitters, and pet logistics
A walker can remove the midday trip home. A sitter handles care while you travel; broader help covers grooming appointments and transportation. It is possible for the dog to have a driver when you don’t. The dog’s calendar may justify this.
Time back: Five 30-minute walks a week replace 2½ hours of walking, plus any avoided commuting. Longer or more frequent walks return more time. Overnight coverage buys freedom to travel rather than 12 active hours saved.
Budget: The Friendly Pet Sitter lists walks at $30–$40 and extended overnight stays from $150. Dedicated pet-sitter salaries reach $60,000–$120,000 annually. Animals, complex routines, holidays, and coverage requirements increase costs.
5. Handymen and property-maintenance staff
A small repair can require a trip for parts, an instructional video, a second trip for the correct parts, and reflection on what your time is worth. A handyman can skip directly to fixing it. Property staff can schedule servicing and meet tradespeople, relieving you of four-hour arrival windows.
Time back: Roughly 2–6 hours a month for an ongoing repair list, plus service windows covered.
Budget: Handyman labor commonly costs $50–$150 an hour, plus materials and minimums. Property-guardian salaries reach $70,000–$120,000 annually. Multiple buildings and complex systems add work; specialist trades remain separate expenses.
6. Holiday decorators
Someone buys, installs, removes, and stores the decorations. Holiday cheer has considerable manual labor attached to it. You can delegate that portion.
Time back: Perhaps 4–12 hours per season if shopping, installation, and removal transfer. Any avoided trips to the ER after falling off a ladder would improve the math.
Budget: Holiday-light installation runs roughly $220–$675. Juniper and Gold lists estate decorating projects typically at $10,000–$18,000-plus, covering multiple trees, mantels, staircases, and exterior installations. Tall trees, rooflines, and custom designs increase costs; confirm removal and storage charges.
Delegate the errands and decisions
7. Personal stylists and wardrobe management
A stylist handles store visits, online searches, comparisons, returns, alterations coordination, outfits, packing, and seasonal wardrobe maintenance. Business Insider describes busy professionals outsourcing those decisions, including vacation outfits planned and photographed.
Fashion periodically announces that your pants are the wrong shape. You can employ someone to monitor these developments and handle the resulting transactions.
Time back: Perhaps 4–10 hours per seasonal refresh or 2–4 hours preparing for a trip. Fittings still require you.
Budget: Business Insider’s profiled stylist charges $250 for a virtual closet cleanout. Harper Neal Style lists annual memberships of $10,000–$30,000; the upper tier includes on-demand styling and local courier support for returns, exchanges, and alterations. Frequency, tailoring, and travel affect costs. The clothes cost extra.
8. At-home hair and makeup
Professionals coming to your home or hotel remove salon travel and waiting. A coordinated booking can replace several appointments before an event.
Time back: About 30–90 minutes per occasion, which adds up if this is a daily occurrence. You still sit through the service.
Budget: Glamsquad starts at $60 for hair and $95 for makeup. Glam Concierge NYC lists an eight-hour hair-and-makeup booking at $3,250, or $3,950 for a four-person team. These full-day packages include touch-ups and differ substantially from routine appointments. Styling complexity, travel, early starts, and coverage hours increase costs.
9. Remote assistants, then personal and family assistants
A remote assistant handles calendars, forms, reservations, and follow-up. In-person help adds errands and deliveries. Family assistance is usually a catch-all category: groceries, pantry restocking, closet sorting, pet appointments, and work from several other categories can land here.
Let the assistant finish things. If every restaurant reservation requires three rounds of approval, you have hired someone to discuss plans with you.
Time back: A five-hour weekly engagement might return 3–4 hours after instructions. An established broader role might remove 10–20 hours.
Budget: Upwork cites $18–$35 an hour for virtual assistance, with advanced support higher. Private personal-assistant salaries span $80,000–$250,000 annually. Travel, discretion, authority, and availability expand the role and cost.
10. Travel advisors and travel concierges
An advisor handles hotel research, routes, transfers, bookings, and disruptions. Then the airline changes a flight, giving the project a useful second life. You choose the destination and budget; you can stop developing strongly held opinions about hotels you have never visited.
Time back: Perhaps 5–15 hours on a substantial trip, after setting priorities.
Budget: LFG Travel advertises booking support from $250. Marchay charges $10,500 annually for ongoing planning and coordination, with some additional flight fees. A June 2025 Fischer Travel article reports $150,000 to join and $25,000 annual renewal fees, plus service charges. Complex itineraries and ongoing access increase costs. The trip itself costs extra.
11. Social-media managers for people who need to show up online
For executives and business owners, this can cover writing, graphics, scheduling, and account monitoring. Having a thought no longer obliges you to spend the evening formatting it for LinkedIn.
Time back: Perhaps 2–5 hours a week if you already do this work. You still supply ideas and approve content.
Budget: Upwork lists freelance rates around $14–$35 an hour. Highly Persuasive advertises engagements up to $8,000 monthly, covering LinkedIn, newsletters, and video content direction, including scripts. Platforms, original writing, and review requirements add cost.
12. Dating-profile help and matchmakers
Someone can write a profile, manage the search, screen prospects, and arrange introductions. Define how much account administration transfers.
Time back: Perhaps 2–4 hours on profile preparation and 2–5 hours weekly on searching and scheduling. You still attend the dates.
Budget: ProfileHelper lists profile-writing options around $100–$400. Tawkify describes luxury industry engagements of $50,000–$100,000-plus, a seller’s high-end estimate. Geography, duration, and screening intensity drive costs.
After all that searching and screening, two people still have to decide whether they like each other. From what I can tell, there is no warranty on a second date.
Take recurring family responsibilities off the calendar
13. Sitters, nannies, travel nannies, and newborn-care specialists
An after-school sitter handles pickup and the gap before work ends. The school day and workday end at different times, leaving families to provide the reconciliation. Nannies cover continuing childcare, travel nannies maintain it away from home, and newborn-care specialists support early routines, sometimes overnight.
Time back: A three-hour after-school window might release 2–3 usable hours. Full-time care can protect the working week; overnight support may restore sleep, depending on feeding arrangements.
Budget: Care.com reports posted rates around $20 an hour for sitters and $22–$27 an hour for nannies. Newborn specialists charge $30–$75-plus hourly; senior nanny salaries reach $95,000–$170,000 annually. Children, experience, travel, overtime, and coverage increase costs.
14. Tutors, private educators, and governesses
A tutor takes over homework supervision, identifies gaps, and structures study time. You may be perfectly capable of explaining fractions. Your child may require the explanation to come from someone who hasn’t told them to finish their vegetables before dessert. Private educators and governesses assume broader educational coordination.
Time back: Perhaps 2–3 parental hours weekly for tutoring; 10+ with a broader role.
Budget: Wyzant reports tutor rates averaging $35–$60 an hour. Private governess salaries run $70,000–$130,000 annually. Subjects, credentials, travel, and curriculum responsibility increase costs.
15. College-admissions consultants
A consultant runs school research, application calendars, requirements, and reminders. Having “How’s the essay coming?” arrive from outside the family can be part of the value.
Time back: Perhaps 10–25 parental hours across an application season. The student still writes, studies, and applies.
Budget: Simply Admissions charges $250 an hour. AdmissionsConsultants lists packages from $5,300 for one application to $21,500 for its largest package. Schools, essay review, and engagement length increase costs. Support does not purchase admission.
Operation Varsity Blues involved parents spending considerably more on bribery and fabricated athletic credentials. The resulting court appearances did not improve the time-saving calculation.
16. Patient advocates, medical-care coordinators, and concierge doctors
An advocate gathers records, schedules appointments, follows up on referrals and bills, and keeps specialists informed. Concierge doctors add medical care, direct access, and sometimes house calls.
Time back: Perhaps 3–8 hours monthly during active coordination, plus avoided travel. Patient decisions and appointments remain.
Budget: Private advocacy runs around $100–$250 an hour in one provider’s comparison. TrufaMED’s Signature membership is $60,000 annually, with unlimited house calls and telehealth, priority referrals, and a coordinator. Bundled wellness services and a separate primary-care add-on complicate comparisons; confirm coverage. Outside care costs extra, and membership doesn’t replace insurance. Expertise, urgency, and access raise costs.
At the expensive end, even the trip to the doctor’s office can become the doctor’s problem.
Hand over an entire recurring operation
17. Weekly meal preparation, then a full-time private chef
Clients with personal chefs often describe them as some of the best help they have hired. Feeding a household requires meal planning, accounting for preferences, shopping, cooking, storing food, and cleaning the kitchen. Then everyone insists on eating the next day.
Weekly batch cooking removes much of that cycle. A full-time chef handles daily meals, changing schedules, and entertaining, reconciling four people’s preferences with the refrigerator.
Time back: Perhaps 5–8 hours weekly for batch cooking; 15–20 for a household that prepares most meals itself.
Budget: Weekly meal preparation at one New York provider costs $250–$350, plus groceries. Senior private-chef salaries run $130,000–$270,000-plus annually. Diets, residences, travel, and entertaining increase costs.
Living paycheck to paycheck to keep your private chef employed is generally not recommended.
18. Drivers and private chauffeurs
A driver handles navigation, parking, and pickup coordination. Traffic continues to exist, but some of that time becomes usable for email, reading, or rest. This improves on personally supervising the brake lights ahead of you.
Time made usable: Perhaps 30–45 minutes of a one-hour journey, depending on the road, task, and your comfort working in a car.
Budget: Hourly service runs around $60–$120 in Rides On Time’s guide, typically with a three-hour minimum. Senior chauffeur salaries run $85,000–$140,000 annually, with vehicles extra. Waiting, irregular hours, travel, and backup coverage add costs.
19. Lifestyle concierges
A concierge carries reservations, gift sourcing, deliveries, and arrangements through to completion. A list of excellent restaurants, all fully booked, is a research product you may have difficulty enjoying.
Time back: Perhaps 3–8 hours monthly if recurring research and coordination transfer.
Budget: Embrace Your Space lists $75 an hour. Privé publishes annual dues of $5,000–$20,000, plus initiation fees of $15,000–$50,000. These are seller prices. Access, request volume, and service scope affect cost; purchases remain additional.
20. Personal bookkeeping
A bookkeeper reconciles accounts, categorizes transactions, organizes records, and prepares reports. Transactions don’t get easier to identify after eleven months of becoming mysterious.
Independent review can reveal spending patterns, duplicate invoices, or potentially fraudulent charges. A Virginia housekeeper and personal assistant was sentenced in 2017 for stealing more than $550,000, using 117 altered or forged checks. The person making payments shouldn’t be the only person reviewing them.
Time back: Perhaps 5–8 hours monthly for several active accounts.
Budget: Virtual Bookkeepers lists personal-finance packages at $275–$675 monthly. White Glove Accounting’s complex business packages start at $1,250 a month, a reference for entity work rather than a household quote. Accounts, transaction volume, reporting, and cleanup increase costs. Confirm whether bill pay is included.
21. Bill pay and daily money management
Someone collects bills, checks them, schedules payments, resolves errors, and retains records.
For an ultra-high-net-worth family, this can span properties, trusts, LLCs, investment entities, family members, employees, vendors, and approval rules. An invoice might concern an LLC-owned house, benefit another family member, and need approval from someone asleep in another time zone. The plumber would just like to be paid. This is a reasonable position, although it does not resolve the entity question.
Time back: Perhaps 2–4 hours monthly for straightforward bills. A family spending 5–10 hours weekly chasing invoices and approvals might recover much of that after setup. Important decisions still come back.
Budget: Heart & Ledger starts standalone bill pay at $135 monthly. Bernstein’s 2024 family-office report illustrates $3,000–$7,000 monthly in a $100 million–$300 million family context, an industry reference rather than a quote. Complexity, approvals, and volume drive costs; broader accounting is separate.
The family is buying a small accounts-payable function: account monitoring, document retention, and coordination with accountants, attorneys, financial advisors, and household managers. It needs authority limits, verification of changed vendor details, separate payment preparation and approval, and independent reconciliation.
A helpful person with the banking password is not an internal-control system.
Honorable mentions
I had a lot of fun writing this, but it got way too long. Here are some of the more extravagant services I found that didn’t get a full section.
- Pumpkin concierges. Someone handles shopping, delivery, and arranging. Four Seasons Porch lists $350–$1,450 packages, with styling upgrades and removal extra. Buying 80 pumpkins is one decision. Owning 80 pumpkins in November is a different problem.
- College-mom concierges. College teaches independence, with optional local parental support available for purchase. Someone handles sick-day deliveries, prescription pickups, and move-in help, saving parents calls or travel. The New York Times reports a $525 annual MindyKnows package; purchases and special requests can add cost.
- Wine-cellar management. Someone organizes bottles, maintains records, researches purchases, and coordinates deliveries. Prestige Vin lists $1,000 and $2,500 monthly plans, with records maintained and periodic visits. Wine and third-party costs are extra. Opening a bottle is now an inventory adjustment.
- Aquarium staff. Specialists handle water testing, filters, cleaning, and equipment checks. S.O. Aquariums starts intensive care at $2,000 monthly for 8–12-plus visits, with materials extra. Size, reef complexity, and visit frequency raise costs.
- Horse concierges. Someone arranges show entries, stalls, horse transport, and lodging for the humans. Mane Concierge’s 2022 introductory sheet lists $45,000 annual membership. Confirm current fees and separate travel costs. Your horse now has a travel advisor.
- Home security. You can hire former Navy SEALs to try to break into your house, with permission, then assess weaknesses and suggest improvements. I actually arranged this for a client. Hardened Structures describes SEAL-led testing. Encyphir’s 2024 guide estimates $4,500–$15,000 for broader residential security and executive-protection assessments; bespoke break-in testing needs its own quote, and upgrades cost extra. This primarily buys security, while delegating assessment and research. For once, the people breaking in leave a report.
You can also buy accountability
Personal trainers, running coaches, tennis instructors, golf coaches, mahjong teachers, and language teachers sell expertise and accountability. You still have to lift, run, play, or learn. Hiring a running coach does not allow you to send the coach on your run and receive the cardiovascular benefits.
The session itself doesn’t return time. Expertise may reduce trial and error, and a standing appointment makes skipping harder. “Someone is expecting me” can accomplish quite a bit that “I should really do that” has failed to accomplish.
Hire someone to manage everyone else
22. Household managers and estate managers
By now, the house is clean, dinner is planned, and the principal has become the chief operating officer of a business with no revenue.
A manager recruits, vets, hires, fires, schedules, supervises, and pays the other help, within the family’s granted authority. The cleaner, chef, nanny, gardener, and plumber have someone else to call. The principal manages one person and handles important exceptions.
If every vendor still has the principal’s phone number and routinely uses it, the principal has not escaped household management. They have merely acquired a team.
Time back: Perhaps 5–15 hours weekly for someone already coordinating staff and vendors, provided the manager can resolve routine decisions.
Budget: Household-manager salaries run $100,000–$180,000 and estate-manager salaries $150,000–$250,000 annually. Oplu’s senior U.S. estate-manager range reaches $425,000-plus and includes accommodation and bonus arrangements, so it differs from base salary. Properties, headcount, and capital projects increase costs. Everyone the manager manages remains on the payroll.
Is the time worth the recurring expense?
Describe the work you want to stop doing, price the full arrangement, and try it at a manageable scale. Then check what left your calendar and what new supervision appeared. There is no need to acquire a second residence to test whether an estate manager would be useful.
At the extravagant end, some spending buys care you never provided yourself. If you previously had a lawn and now have a hedge maze, its maintenance hasn’t returned hours you spent maintaining a maze. It supports an expanded lifestyle. That can be worthwhile, but identify what you’re buying.
Suppose a hypothetical household hires a full-time, live-out chef at a $150,000 base salary. Assume employment costs add 20% and the chef returns 20 household hours weekly over 50 weeks, after coordination.
| Calculation | Amount |
|---|---|
| Base salary | $150,000 |
| Assumed employment costs, 20% | $30,000 |
| Estimated annual cost | $180,000 |
| Time returned, 20 hours × 50 weeks | 1,000 hours |
| Cost per household hour returned | $180 |
The 20% allowance is illustrative. Placement fees, overtime, travel, bonuses, backup coverage, and groceries are excluded; count any increase in food spending separately.
In this example, you are buying back household time at about $180 an hour. Is that worth it to you?
For your own comparison, include current takeout, delivery, and meal-service spending the chef would replace. Compare the resulting additional cost with hours your household actually spends on meals. A family ordering dinner most nights has fewer cooking hours to reclaim. No particular savings are assumed here.
Those hours can go to exercise, your children, or sitting down without planning dinner. They don’t have to generate revenue. Two uninterrupted weekend hours may matter more to you than several scattered gaps between errands.
Before you hire
Full-time salaries generally exclude payroll taxes, benefits, overtime, housing, travel, vehicles, placement fees, and backup coverage. The salary is what you tell yourself it costs while you’re still excited about the idea.
Direct employment brings responsibilities. The IRS generally treats a household worker as your employee when you control both the work and how it is done. Federal and state payroll, wage, insurance, and employment requirements need attention.
A financial advisor helps test affordability alongside cash flow, taxes, investments, insurance, and other goals. A comprehensive financial plan should account for how the commitment holds up if income falls or priorities change.
About those cleaners
I wish we had hired the cleaners earlier. We could afford them, we wanted the time, and the work kept needing to be done. I had somehow treated our ability to do it ourselves as the end of the discussion.
My wife had already worked this out. I have now written an entire article catching up.
This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or tax advice. The examples are hypothetical and omit factors that may be relevant to a particular taxpayer, including state taxes. Tax rules are complex and may change. Please consult your tax professional and other qualified advisors before implementing a financial-planning strategy. Wolf Pine Capital does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided. All investments involve risk, and past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Peter is the founder of Wolf Pine Capital, a fee-only fiduciary wealth management firm dedicated to helping individuals and families achieve financial clarity and build generational wealth. With a background in mechanical engineering and years of experience in wealth management, Peter combines data-driven strategies with a personalized approach to financial planning and investing. When he’s not helping clients secure their financial futures, Peter enjoys skiing, cycling, jiu-jitsu.
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