Food Allowance

Hi,


I ve signed a contract wth my DH who took it to the Phil consulate last week..there she was told by the officials that we need to give a letter saying we ll be providing her wth food at home in case we r not paying $300 otherwise the immigration will not accept the application..


is that true?..

If this is true, then this a new rule. However, the POEA is ALWAYS changing their rules often without notice! If your DH says they told her that thenI would believe her and write the letter, it's part of your contract anyway. Why you need the letter is beyond me, half the stuff that comes out of the Phil. consulate doesn't make any sense.....

my understanding is that if she eats with you and you provide all the food, you dont have to give an allowance. If you do not provide food, $300 is a minimum. Tho, we give ours food allowance of $1,000 as I do not want them to starve, which is exactly what they will do on $300!

I ve already told my helper that i ll be providing food to her and she has agreed..but now she's asking me (politely) to tick on the $300 allowance segment of the contract but also says that I dont need to pay that amount as she ll eat at home..but i told her that i wont put anything on paper which i wont be providing as that might cause a friction btw us later..she has agreed now..but why was she insisting earlier?..

she might be trying it on with you.. no, you are right - you should not put anything in the contract that you are not prepared to pay. On the topic of providing food - you might consider doing the allowance tho - I think quite a few people on this forum mentioned that providing food is sort of a funny one - you end up either eating cheaper food yourself or feeling that feeding the same stuff as you eat to the helper might be a bit too expensive. We buy steaks and organic veg (esp for babies) etc, so I find it much easier to just give our helpers (good!) allowance and not worry that you need to buy an extra steak at something like $50 a piece!

We don't give our helper an allowance for just that reason - so that she does eat organic steak, imported chicken, vegetables, fresh fish etc. If she does not like what we are having, she just buys whatever she fancies at the supermarket when she is doing our shopping. It is partly selfishly motivated, but I do not want her living on dried noodles and tinned food so that she can send as much money as possible home. Whatever you decide, it turns out that we did have to tick the box to say that we would give her an allowance. I think it is to ensure that she still gets smething should we decide to fire her or whatever. The line on the contract reads 'If no food allowance is provided, an allowance of HK$..... a month shall be paid to the Helper'.

Mrsl - that is exactly why we give ours $1,000 and not $300 - so she does not live on the dry noodles! She cooks herself freash meat, fish etc. Good on you if you decided to feed her the organic steak, it is just too expensive for us.

Idsllvn, it was not meant as a criticism. It's just that it works for us. If we gave our helper cash, she'd send every penny bar the bare minimum home (her own admission). Some helpers would be more sensible than that but her motivation is to get as much cash as possible as quickly as possible to get back to her family as soon as she can. Totally admire her motivation, but know that she would do it to the detriment of her own health. She actually prefers the way we do things now because she does not have to feel guilty about spending the money on herself (imagine feeling guilty about making sure that you eat sensibly).

thanx to all of u for the reply..

Except Starlionblue, if she eats so badly that she is prone to pick up every bug going and bring it home with her, not only will it interfere with her duties, it will more importantly interfere with my family's health. I assume this is what mrsl meant when she said that their approach was 'partly selfishly motivated'. It is certainly the reason that we take a similar approach.

Dora the Explorer is correct in her assumption. Also Starlionblue, our DH does get to eat or drink what she wants, she just does not have a set budget. If she wants to have what we're having, she's welcome to do so, otherwise she gets what she fancies (she thinks that lots of our dishes are extremely weird) when she's shopping. I've just put it a SouthStream order and she added two items to the list just for her. She's happy with the arrangement and so are we.

Am also in the process of hiring a DH to take care of our coming bably and wondering how the food arrangement should work. As we don't eat regularly at home and hence don't do a lot of grocery shopping, we don't want to have to worry about buying the DH's food all the time. Also don't want to start off with reimbursing her for whatever she buys for herself due to the uncertainty involved (after all we don't know for sure whether she'll behave reasonably or not). Therefore we have decided to let her eat what we eat for breakfast (milk, bread, butter, fruit preserve), and we'll also provide her with rice and cooking oil, salt, sauces, etc. (as we always have these things) for cooking her other two meals. Then we'll give her a cash allowance to buy vegitables, meat, poultry, etc.


As I was intially trying to figure out how much is a fair amount to give, I read the threads on this forum. Impression was that one can only eat trash with the $300 statutory minimum (or even $500), let alone the fact that my husband and I may occasionally spend $200 for one meal at a not-so-fancy restaraunt (though of course that's not the benchmark to compare with). To have a real sense of how much it's going to cost to buy groceries to cook two meals a day, I cooked for myself when taking a few days off recently and here's my bill. Everything was bought from Wellcome.


1 pack of pork (about 180g, $11), 1 pack of chicken breast ($13), 1 pack of sliced beef ($15), 1 piece of mud fish ($8), 24 eggs ($37, about $1.5 each), 1 pack of string bean ($6), three green peppers ($2.7 each), two cucumbers ($4 each), two eggplants ($3 each), two potatoes ($3.5 each), two tomatoes ($2.75 each), one turnip ($4.8). I did not use up everything after the 5 days described below.


I cooked two dishes a day, either one at each meal or both at lunch and eating leftovers for dinner. I cooked relatively simple Chinese dishes, but paid attention to balanced nutrition (for me that means a good mix of vegitables, meat and eggs).


- Day 1: string bean stired fried with 60g of pork and 1 egg; 1 green pepper stir fried with half pack of sliced beef. Total cost $21.2.


- Day 2: 1 eggplant stired fried with 60g of pork; 1 cucumber stir fried with 1 egg. Total cost $12.


- Day 3: 1 potato stir fried with 1 green pepper and 60g of pork; 2 tomatoes stir fried with 1 egg. Total cost $16.7.


- Day 4: a soup made of 1 piece of fish and 1 turnip; 1 green pepper stired fried with half pack of chicken breast. Total cost $22.


- Day 5: 1 potato stir fried with half pack of sliced beef; 1 cucumber stir fried with 1 egg. Total cost $16.5.


So on average it cost me $17.68 per day.


This result of calculation really shocked me in the first instance. I thought I was eating well, but why was it so much cheaper than I had expected?


Two things can make the cost significantly higher. First is the diet. I don't eat a lot of things like steak or salmon like most westerners do. By looking at what the DHs eat in the park on Sundays, it seems that their food is similar to the Chinese dishes. Second is the shopping place and the "quality" of the stuff you buy. If one is only buying organic food at places like Citysuper or Great, I can easily imagine her spending $50 for one meal. On the other hand, if one goes to the street market, it's going to be even cheaper than what I spent at Wellcome.


So the conclusion? We are planning to start with a $500 monthly food allowance. If we get along well with our DH, we'll probably let her eat our food when we occasionally cook at home and we'll probably also invite her to a dim sum once in a while over the weekend (especially if we want to take the baby). That may save her something like $20 a week to buy fruits or snacks if she likes. ($20 can buy 6 apples or 8 kiwi fruits at Wellcome).


It may seem funny for me to have gone through this exercise, but it did make me feel a lot more certain about what's the reasonable thing to do. $500 is not a very generous amount, but it does not seem unreasonable based on my experiment. It's surely a nice thing to offer a higher amount so that she can afford things like organic food, but given that those are not on the plate of an average Hong Kong person everyday (esp. if the employer's family don't often eat those themselves), it does not seem unreasonable not to budget the food allowance based on the price of those things. We'd like to see how our planned approach works and are open for adjustments if necessary.

There are several charities that I am involved in here in Hong Kong miao miao. Many of these focus on the homeless and deprived children. Please let me know if you would like to assist.

Maio maio, I think that's an excellent observation and exercise you went through. We did somthing similar and were quite suprised as well and have adjusted up our helpers food allowance, which I amsure some of the delightful employers will cringe at, but, since we can afford to do so we will. many cannot and I understand that.

Good Post though

we talked about 500 a month - then we'd provide vegetables, rice, oil, bread and regular items. Helper to buy fish and meat with 500 - maybe should include veggies in the 500 - noticed our organic veg is getting more and more expensive.

shahirakk - always amazes me - why do people dig out something that was posted a year ago??