From: "Robert Seeberger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
The economic value of a stay-at-home spouse is closer to $30,000 a year. Our
society doesn't place a high dollar value on a homemaker's work, and those
who choose to stay home do so at their own economic peril.
The numbers that purport to show otherwise are flights of the author's fancy. They're typically constructed from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' average pay figures for a variety of occupations including:
Child-care worker, $8.91 an hour Maid, $8.02 an hour Food preparation supervisor, $11.70 an hour Bookkeeper, $11.94 an hour Chauffeur, $8.67 an hour
The formula is simple. Figure out how many hours, on average, a homemaker
performs each task, multiply those hours by the appropriate wage and come up
with an impressive and completely overblown annual figure.
The problem here, as I see it, is that they're calculating these numbers as if the homemaker were an employee of some company getting paid those wages per hour. But the problem is that for insurance purposes, I'd really want to calculate actual replacement costs:
While some daycare center might (under)pay it's child-care workers $8.91 per hour, that's a far cry from what I'd have to pay someone to provide what is essentially 24-7 child care in my house, for my 3 very young children.
The same goes for a maid service, chauffeur, etc. You couldn't hire these people to work for you for the necessary hours and necessary times of the day for anything close to the rates they list.
And families who lose a stay-at-home spouse typically do not rush out to hire 17 professionals to take his or her place, let alone employ them 24/7. They may hire one or two people, usually for 50 hours a week or less, and pay them an hourly wage of $10 to $15.
That's why the economic payout is typically less in wrongful death and other
lawsuits when the victim is a stay-at-home spouse than when the victim is
employed. The lifetime economic value of a female homemaker who dies at age
30 is currently about $300,000, Schouten said, based on statistics from a
seminal study in this area, "The Dollar Value of Household Work."
True, they don't hire 17 pros for 24/7, but they couldn't possibly afford to! And unless you had a mansion to house them in, would be unworkable. That doesn't mean that the loss doesn't exist or isn't real, it just means that families can scrape by with lesser amounts of care, cleaning, etc. This whole argument to me seems similar to saying that if someone crashed their $150K Ferrari, and only bought a $70K Jaguar with the insurance payout, that the Ferarri was only worth $70K.
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