How Home Care Overtime Can Cost You a Fortune
Is your home care provider effective at managing its schedule? If not, you could be on the hook for unnecessary home care overtime.
Home care overtime affects seniors by limiting how many hours a caregiver can work per week.
While overtime laws are a net positive, they prevent caregivers from accepting more jobs in the field of eldercare. As a result, caregivers are often disappointed that they have to leave behind clients they regard very highly.
You can choose to pay the extra cost of having a caregiver over forty hours per week, but that’s a rare exception. When that situation does occur, it usually only lasts for short periods.
So, we decided to go over how overtime affects home care companies and you. Just remember, every state has different overtime laws.
What you’ll learn in this article:
Cost of Goods Sold
“Cost of goods sold” is the total cost for items or services a business provides that form the backbone of the company’s revenue. Without this good or service, the company would no longer exist.
For a grocery store, it’s their food; for Ford Motor Co., it’s their cars; for us, it’s our caregivers. These goods and services are typically the biggest expense a company has – it’s the product they’re directly selling.
How You Can Deal With Home Care Overtime
As mentioned before, overtime laws become difficult when a client bonds with a specific caregiver and looks for as many hours with that person as possible. When we mention the additional cost of going into overtime, it usually ends the conversation quickly. The cost can be prohibitive.
It’s tough for families to establish a connection between a client and a caregiver and then realize it’s not financially feasible. You do have the choice to spend the extra money, but since many agencies can’t afford to absorb the cost, most clients can’t either.
Minute Women can help you plan for your home care needs. Explore our services to see how we can assist you.
Home Care Overtime Inflation
As costs go up for many businesses, unfortunately so do our rates. This inflation, naturally, causes overtime rates to increase as well. So as costs go up over the years, this will continue to cause overtime rates to increase.
When costs increase, that reflects in the prices of a company’s goods and services. As minimum wages increase, so too do non-minimum wage employees, as rising tides raise all boats. Included in the pricing are increases in inflation, which amounts to about 3% per year on average.
Who Pays for Home Care Overtime?
You should know when and why you will have to pay for overtime. Understandably, families can get upset when overtime bills hit their wallets, and they want to understand why they’re responsible for footing the bill. There are scenarios where we pass the costs along and others where we do not.
No matter the situation, we always try and prevent going into overtime. It keeps our clients happy and our seniors safe at the lowest costs possible.
We pass along overtime costs when the reason for overtime is out of our control. For Minute Women, the two common culprits are national holidays and snowstorms.
When snowstorms are threatening, we pre-plan in the days leading up to the storm to provide coverage without caregivers going into overtime. However, this advanced scheduling isn’t always possible. We always give you the choice of coverage, but sometimes that decision is one you aren’t prepared to make.
With as many storms as we receive in New England, we believe we do an outstanding job minimizing overtime from Nor’easters.
When Minute Women absorbs over time, it’s because the circumstance was preventable or our fault. In other words, car breakdowns, family emergencies, or miscommunication can create last-minute call-outs. These are all reasons we would absorb the cost of overtime if the caregiver has already worked forty hours that week.
Our expert home care providers take care of the scheduling, so you don’t have to. Give us a call today to see how we can help your parents receive the care they need, all from the comfort of their own homes.