If you need help taking care of your kids (Who doesn’t?), you might consider asking your boss. Many employers are sensitive to the needs of working parents and offer benefits to ease their stress.
Why would companies be so thoughtful? It’s not altruism. “More and more, companies are realizing the need to incorporate family-friendly benefits to recruit and retain talent,” says Alyssa Johnson, vice president of global account management for Care@Work, a division of Care.com that customizes corporate care benefits. In particular, “trying to keep women in the workforce, I think, is something every industry is grappling with.”
Indeed, 85 percent of working parents wish their employer offered child care benefits, according to online child care resource Care.com’s 2017 Cost of Care Survey, and 62 percent of employees would leave their jobs for one with better benefits, according to Care.com’s 2015 Better Benefits survey.
[See: 8 Things You Really Need to Know About the Family and Medical Leave Act.]
Given the increasingly high cost of care, it’s no wonder the issue is top of mind for most parents. In 2013, the average cost of having an infant in day care was $186 a week. In 2016, that weekly price went up to $211, on average, according to Care.com. For a nanny, the cost went from $472 a week in 2013 to $565 a week in 2016. Unsurprisingly, for about a third of families, those costs amount to 20 percent or more of their annual household incomes.
“Every working parent struggles with the juggle,” says financial planner Marguerita Cheng, CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
What are some employer benefits you can take advantage of to help foot the bill for child care?
Cheng recommends using dependent-care flexible spending accounts. Offered by 67 percent of U.S. employers, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, these accounts allow you to save pre-tax money to cover child care, including day care, a nanny and possibly even summer camp. You can sign up during open enrollment season or within a month of a new baby’s birth. Currently, the IRS-set contribution limit is $5,000 per family for the year (your employer determines the minimum and maximum amounts employees can contribute). You lose anything you don’t use by the end of the year, but that shouldn’t be a problem: Based on the averages noted above, day care for an infant would total nearly $11,000 for 52 weeks, while a nanny would cost a whopping $29,380 for the year.
“Unfortunately, these benefits aren’t indexed for inflation and were passed a long time ago, so the real value of FSAs and the like are well below what they were when they passed,” says economist Michael Madowitz of the Center for American Progress. “If you can use them, you’ll probably blow through them quickly, especially in full-time care.”
Still, any little bit helps. If you’re in the 30 percent tax bracket and save the maximum $5,000 in a dependent care account, you’d save $1,500 for the year.
[See: Your Month-to-Month Guide to Savings.]
Another option is to utilize a company’s on-site day care. Typically, these facilities are far more affordable than other day cares, often costing half as much. Plus, you get the peace of mind of having your kids nearby, which is particularly useful if you’re breastfeeding and have time during your workday to swing by and nurse the baby.
Unfortunately, it’s not an incredibly common employee offering. Even among Working Mother’s selection of the 100 best companies — which includes Bank of America, Deloitte and IBM among the top 10 — less than half have an on-site child care center. A more common option is backup child care, offered by 92 percent of the 100 best companies for working mothers. This benefit provides that your employer will give you assistance if and when your regular child care falls through. “If your nanny is sick, your child is sick or there’s a school holiday, your employer subsidizes backup care,” says Johnson, explaining that you’d be able to call on a certified nanny or opt to bring your child to a day care.
Flexible schedules and the ability to work from home can be another lifesaver for working parents. Luckily, this option is a pretty popular offering: Fifty-seven percent of U.S. companies offer flexible scheduling, and 62 percent allow telecommuting, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Of course, working from home doesn’t mean you’re free to care for kids while on the clock. After all, little ones aren’t always so respectful of their parents’ need for privacy, quiet or focus. (Remember the toddlers who disrupted their dad’s BBC television appearance?) But cutting out a commute can shave time off your paid child care hours. Plus, you can squeeze in some household chores during work breaks and free up that time for family (or yourself) later.
Also, see if your company has — or if you can put together — an affinity group for working parents. The old saying is that it takes a village to raise a child. With workplace affinity groups, you can find your village among your colleagues. You can provide one another moral support, child care recommendations, connections for possible nanny shares (which allow families to divvy the costs and services of a nanny) or cooperative nursery schools and lobby for other benefits together. Especially when it comes to searching for the right child care for your family, “it’s really critical to leverage your network,” Johnson says.
And if your boss doesn’t currently provide the help you need to manage family and work, don’t be afraid to ask about changing that. Before broaching the subject, Johnson recommends seeing what kinds of benefits your company’s competitors and other local businesses are offering. On top of checking companies’ own websites, you can use services such as Glassdoor, Fairygodboss and Working Mother to do this research.
[See: 10 Money Tips for Family Caregivers.]
Talk to your colleagues, too, to see what kinds of benefits they would be interested in. “As an employee, you’re not alone in needing work family support,” Johnson says. “Find strength in numbers.”
Finally, make a stand. Be prepared to show your boss how successful family-friendly initiatives have been to bring up the bottom line and retain good workers for other companies, as well as how these benefits would improve your own productivity for the company.
“Whether you’re asking your manager for the flexibility to work from home or asking HR for paid leave or backup care benefits, explaining how these benefits will help you and other employees meet goals and objectives is really important,” Johnson says. “Ultimately, when employees are able to do good work, it drives results for the organization, so it’s a win-win.”
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5 Ways Your Boss Can Help You Save on Child Care originally appeared on usnews.com
