Know Your Worth
I’m a software engineer with a full-time job and a side hustle of doing freelance coding work in my own time. I’ve always been the type to have a side hustle I put a lot of my free time into; I get really bored sitting idle.
My freelance hourly rates are $60 an hour, and at my full-time job my hourly pay works out to about $40 an hour. So that’s how I value my time. Anyway, over Christmas vacation, I was staying at my parents’ house. My cousin was also staying over with her three young kids from Christmas to New Year’s.
I’d been planning on doing some work on my freelance projects when I had free time in the mornings when my family had no plans. I wasn’t in any rush; I was already ahead of schedule on them all, but I didn’t really have anything else to do.
It was in a really rural area and it’s like an hour’s drive to the nearest anything. Then my cousin and her husband asked if I could babysit all day for three days so they could visit some friends in the area and hang out with just adults.
I said I had planned on doing freelance work at the library, and she offered to pay me to babysit. I said I could if they got close to my freelance rates. She wanted a number, and although my freelance rates are $60 I didn’t feel like that was right, as it was high.
But I didn’t want to go too low; honestly babysitting three kids would be harder for me than the routine coding work I had for my freelance project. I don’t know a lot about kids and I’ve never babysat for long, and I had a feeling it would be stressful and difficult.
So I said $35, which is below what I make hourly at work, and that is the bare minimum I’d value my time for if that time is spent doing difficult work. She went crazy.
She said that’s a ridiculous rate for babysitting, that I was entitled and being selfish, that I’m trying to take advantage of how she didn’t have other options, etc. I said that’s way below what I’d be making if I had the time to do my own work, and I’d be putting off my own work to babysit.
Her husband then got mad at me saying that I was a 24-year-old girl, that I’m darn near a child myself, that my time is not worth that much and it’s childish to say that it was.
He said that I was a stupid girl for not knowing that babysitting costs like 15 an hour, and when I grew up and have kids of my own I will see how stupid I was being. I was kind of done with being called stupid so I just told them I hoped they could find someone else.
My mom thinks that I asked for something offensive, and my cousin and her husband obviously did too. Story credit: Reddit / HENNYDEFN