The Grand Experiment: Taking a baby-sitting stand

The whole point of working is to make money, of course, but it turns out that holding a job is a pretty expensive proposition.

There's the cost of your work clothes, your commute to work, lunch, parking, plus intangibles, such as the cost to your self-esteem when it's groveling time before the boss and the cost to your sanity when your nearest co-worker spends hours mumbling along to her downloads of ABBA's greatest hits.

I don't care how many Volvos or how much Absolut vodka they send us, the Swedes can never undo thatdamage.

But when I go to trim my work-related spending as part of the Grand Experiment, in which I try to cut $100 from 10 categories of my family budget, these expenses don't show up. Commuting costs are part of auto expenses, lunch and clothing come out of my personal spending, and the Xanax co-pays fall under the medical category.

Tough balancing act

My only big professional expenses are subscriptions to Detroit's finest newspaper (plus that other hippy thing that gets printed daily), journalism reviews, and child care for Li'l Money. Mrs. Your Money works two afternoon shifts that overlap with my work hours, so our roster of sitters racks up to six hours a day. That's an average of $126 a week to keep the kid from ingesting a week's supply of Teddy Grahams or flushing the dining room drapes.

Now, my mother didn't have any children dumb enough to write a newspaper column about canceling their newspaper subscriptions, so finding any savings here means I need to save on tending to the young 'un.

That's a tough balancing act: Cut too much, and the best sitters will simply drop the Your Money family. I need sitters smart enough to help a kid with special needs through his homework, not some tween-age girls giving him plot points to the latest "Twilight" installment.

Child care always is a gnarly problem, with no easy or dependable solutions. But in this case the answer is simple: Dad.

Take work home

As a reporter, there's some leeway in my day, but too often I let work slip into the evening when that isn't really necessary. Starting earlier or taking a nondeadline story home shaves an hour or more off each day's baby-sitting tab. That saves some real money over the course of a month, without making a big cut in the hours for our sitters.

Some planning and hustle to get home so that the sitters put in only eight hours a week reduces the child care cost by $30. I figure I can do that three times a month, so that if one night Ben Bernanke is trapped in a runaway balloon I can work late without busting the family budget, and still save $90 a month.

It's not quite the $100 I'm aiming for, but with the extra savings from a few other categories, it brings the five-week savings total to $518.39, still more than the $100-per-week goal.

It'll mean a bit of a struggle, but as someone once sang, "I work all night, I work all day, to pay the bills I have to pay."

Sadly, it was ABBA.

Boconnor@detnews.com">Boconnor@detnews.com (313) 222-2145