The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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For what it's worth, I feel this even as the male half of the household and sole breadwinner. I think this anxiety is natural for people in our position, but I also know my dad was gone from 5am-6pm every day for work. We made the most of the weekends and vacations and my relationship with him is equally strong as the one I have with my mom.
If I can talk through some of your work options:
What was the total outlay for the Au Pair? Having one is something I never considered as something I could do... but now I'm wondering if it's possible. I have a pretty big house right now, but our guest room shares a restroom with the kids. Not sure how much of a disqualifier that is.
What platform do you use to freelance?
For Au Pair: A shared bathroom is fine. Currently costs are about 35k a year, with about 10k given to the agency, 15k to the Au Pair directly (The minimum is around 10k), and 10k from education (there is a mandatory stipend for them to attend schoool,) increased utilities, food, toiletries, etc. If your kids are older and in school, I think paying the minimum works fine. Some people have Au Pairs drive their school-aged kids to and from school and to extra curriculars.
However, we expect the costs to double if the state department rules go into affect.
I use TopTal. I believe it's a step up from platforms like Fiverr, however there's also more aggressive screening. For example, I came on the platform as a full-stack developer. This required 2 interviews and the creation of a whole application from scratch, which took ~8 hours. I believe for management it's less.
That being said, I've gotten opportunities with a mix of startups and impressive logos who value onshore talent. They have great training opportunities too to keep you busy and upskilled. Not perfect by any means, but it's been way more lucrative than playing video games in the evening.
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