Moms do so much for their families. Some women are stay at home moms, who spend their days taking care of children, and keeping up with all the work that is required in order to keep up a household. Other moms spend time working a full or part time job, and then come home to take care of the children and the chores. Women tend to underestimate the value of the work they do. This can be problematic when it comes to life insurance.
A survey that was done by The Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company reveals that women tend to seriously undervalue the work that they do. The survey noted that single mothers do a tremendous amount of household chores. It also noticed that moms who are married are still doing more housework then their husbands are doing, even now, in 2011. This survey was called the “Worth for Women Survey” and is the third annual survey of it’s kind done by Penn Mutual.
The survey called the work that both women and men do at home “second shift” work, (after they have finished their workday at their place of employment). Both the women and the men estimated the value of the work they do around the house to be worth around $25,000 a year. Things changed, however, when the survey asked people to make an estimation about how many hours they spend on housework, childcare, and other work that takes place in the home.
The men, as a group, overestimated the amount of hours they spend doing housework. Women tended to severely underestimate how many actual hours they spend on housework. Penn Mutual calculated the median value of housework services. They found that men’s contribution to the home was around worth around $19,322 per year, while the contribution by the women was worth closer to $34,256 annually.
Moms who had young children were the most likely to severely underestimate the financial value of the work they did at home. These moms thought their housework contributions were worth around $29,000, when in reality, it was closer to being around $44,913. Penn Mutual took into account the time spent on childcare, “homemaking”, and budget management in order to come up with an estimated value of work.
The point of all this calculating is to make women realize that the work they do is important to their families in a financial way. When a person gets a life insurance policy, it is because that person wants to make sure that their family will be taken care of, financially, after the person has passed away. People figure out how much money they make in a year, and they think about how much money they would need in order to pay off what is left of their mortgage.
Few people think about how much it would cost to hire someone to do the household chores, and to provide child care, if the parent who does the majority of that work was gone. The Penn Mutual study points out that women really should value the work they do at home more highly. If the worse happens, and you pass away, your life insurance policy can help your family. However, if you underestimated the cost of the work you do, then your life insurance is going to be insufficient for your families needs. This is something that is worth thinking about.
Image by Christopher Sessums on Flickr