A Life Hack for the Ultra-Wealthy Is Going Mainstream

Here is the promise of a house manager. Hire one, and soon someone else could be doing your laundry, washing your dishes, prepping your meals, and completing those Amazon returns you’ve been meaning to make. They could reorganize the utensil drawer, notice if your kid is outgrowing their shoes and order more, take your car to the repair shop, and be at home to meet the plumber. If your child needs food for a class party, a house manager could make the dish and drop it off; if that child also has a pet lizard, a house manager could buy the crickets to feed it.

House managers are not a nanny or a house cleaner. They’re a “chief of staff for the home,” a “personal assistant for Mom,” and “a clone of myself,” according to the more than a dozen people I spoke with who have either hired one or work as one. They are, in effect, what might have once been called a housekeeper—a person who helps oversee a household’s basic functioning. Middle- and upper-class families used to more commonly employ this kind of position (the title “house manager” dates back to at least the 1830s), but it has become rare enough that a couple of people I spoke with thought they may have come up with the term.

Whatever you call the job, the ultra-wealthy have maintained some version of this role in their homes for years, but more and more companies are cropping up to serve Americans with salaries in the lower six figures—a cohort that is nowhere near having a private jet but might already use a house cleaner or have a regular handyman.

Some will argue that shouldering the burden of household work is a necessary part of adulthood. But for many on the high side of the country’s wealth divide, time is at enough of a premium that buying it back feels worth the money. Kelly Hubbell, who in 2023 founded Sage Haus, a company that helps people find house managers, told me that many of her clients are dual-income households where tasks pile up beyond what two adults can handle; a house manager steps in as a third. Several women described their house manager to me as “my wife.” One company offering the service is even called “Rent A Wife—Oregon.” (Its founder, Brianna Ruelas Zuniga, knows what the name sounds like; she still likes it, she told me.)

Many house-managing businesses started around the country at about the same time. In 2022, Amy Root was running a home-organization business in central Connecticut—clearing out people’s garages and adding shelving to their closets—but she realized that even if she got the right home systems in place, “the laundry still needed to get done,” she told me. People needed “help with their regular to-dos but also the aspiration checklist,” such as finally hanging that one painting they bought a year ago, she said. In 2023, she pivoted to running a house-managing business, Personal Assistant for Mom, and now leads a team of five (soon to be seven) part-time house managers.

The crew includes retirees and empty nesters, as well as a woman training to be a doula and an artist who needed an extra gig. Rates for house managers generally are $25 to $50 an hour; some agencies take a cut. (Sage Haus charges clients a finder’s fee; house managers are paid directly.) Today’s version of the job is very much part of the gig economy, and like many gig workers, the managers are usually responsible for their own health insurance. Some of the house managers I spoke with work full-time for one family, but many are cobbling together part-time gigs with multiple families while also working as a nanny or cleaner.

When Root tells people what a house manager does, most of the time, their response is “Someone will do that for me?” A time-saving purchase like that just doesn’t occur to a lot of people, Ashley Whillans, a Harvard Business School professor who studies such spending, told me. About a decade ago, she and her colleagues asked people what they would do with an extra $40, and most of them said they’d use it for bills or a nice experience; only 2 percent said they’d use the money for a service that would save them time. Back then, Whillans said, Taskrabbit was really the only chore-outsourcing platform, but as these services have become more common, more people with the money to spend seem to see it as a way to escape the worst parts of their day. “I’m buying back joy and time where I can right now,” Barbara Mighdoll, a mother of two and a business owner who now has a house manager for 15 hours a week, told me. Each time her house manager does a chore, she said, “that is a tab that is now closed in my brain.” When she’s with her family, she no longer has ticker tape running through her head about the laundry she needs to put away. The house manager already took care of it.

A purchase like that really can buy happiness, according to Whillans’s research. She and her colleagues have found that when people outsource bothersome chores and reinvest that time in something they actually care about, they report being more satisfied with their life. (Anyone who hates doing the dishes will not be surprised by this.) In one study, she and her co-authors found that couples who take that freed-up time and spend it on each other say that it improved their relationship. So far, Whillans has yet to see a point at which couples who off-load their to-dos stop getting happier. Some tentative evidence, she said, suggests that when given money for time-saving purchases, lower-income people report more benefits than their wealthier counterparts. But where someone in the so-called upper-middle class might consider $30 an hour a bargain, being able to buy back time is still a luxury.

If they can afford it, though, “people are now turning to the market for social support,” Whillans said. The gig economy has only made this easier: A person can now order soup on DoorDash when they’re sick rather than asking a loved one to make it, or take an Uber from the airport instead of getting a ride from a friend. Almost everyone I spoke with who has a house manager lives far from their family; several said that they lacked a “village.” Kara Smith Brown, a mother of two and a founder of a PR consultancy, told me that without “grandparents, or aunts and uncles to kick in at all” and be the village, “you kind of have to build your own and pay for it.”

It’s not ideal, but people who’ve hired house managers feel that paying is an improvement on their status quo. Eliza Jackson, the mother of an eighteen-month-old and the chief operating officer of a direct-to-consumer meat-delivery company called ButcherBox, would wake up early before her son so that she could get chores done, cook breakfast, get him ready, drive the hour and a half in traffic to the office, work all day, commute home, cook dinner on the nights her husband didn’t, then do more household administration until bedtime. “I don’t think the day that I’m describing is unusual,” she told me. “I just thought you suffered through it.”

In January, she and her husband hired Katie Eastlack, a 23-year-old recent college grad, through Sage Haus. Eastlack had been living with her parents in Virginia and struggling to find education jobs after graduation, but she realized that she was already doing something she enjoyed: helping someone, in this case her mom, run a home. She hoped to move to Boston and scoured Indeed for personal-assistant and house-managing jobs there, until she came upon Sage Haus’s listing to work at Jackson’s home. Finding the right family was important, Eastlack told me, because she is in their lives full-time. She has a family credit card for household expenses and is trusted to, say, choose the right repairman for Jackson’s car. (She didn’t say this, but working for the wrong family, in a gig job with no HR, could easily turn into a nightmare.) Eastlack likes that her job helps Jackson and her husband, who both have demanding careers, spend more time with their kid. And it has meant that she got to move to Boston and now has her own apartment.

She’s still getting used to the feeling of coming home at night and realizing that she has her own house chores to do. Kristen Milburn, who house-manages part-time for a dual-physician home in Oklahoma City, told me something similar: The role “requires a lot of physical energy,” which she’s not sure she can maintain forever. And as much as she loves her job, doing someone else’s housework all day “does make it a little harder to want to come home and do laundry and dishes,” she said. “But it gets done.” Running one household is a lot of work—let alone two.