Say you hire a nanny for $6k/mo... What problem have you solved? You're still paying the six grand, and you had better hope the nanny is good, because that is your kids' whole world now for a chunk of their existence.
It's also done at your house so there is no transport, you can create play areas and the like to your own imagining, set the standards for what is expected, have easier access to the exact foods/etc you want your children consuming, and so on. You also have a lot more freedom for your children to experience things you want them to. For instance if you want your kids to go to the park on Wednesdays, you can set that up.
There's also small things like the fact that most kids are going to get endlessly and repeatedly sick in daycare due to close contact with a large number of other children and relatively premature immune systems - when anybody gets sick, most of everybody gets sick. Some of those will be one-time-only sicknesses that everybody will get, sooner or later, but a lot are just colds and other things that kids will catch endlessly. And so on. There's plenty I'm leaving out but basically you get better, more personalized, care over which you have much more control, and pay less.
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One thing I'd also add on. I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required. They obviously need to know how to care for a child and so having one who has had at least one child on her own is good, and bordering on a requirement, and they should know basic first aid and emergency treatment (like what to do if a baby is choking), but beyond that - I think the most important thing for a child is simply the personal connection. If somebody gets into nannying they presumably already love children and, at least for me, that's mostly what I'm looking for.
It's totally fine that you've chosen a nanny over daycare. I did for my first, and I think we'll go with a nanny for my second, but you're presenting a wildly misleading perspective here.
Agreed that it depends on the area. In high cost-of-living areas, both nanny and childcare can be (significantly) higher than $6k/mo, and in lower cost-of-living areas they're typically a bit less. In my experience having lived in different areas the price ranges for infant/toddler daycares and (legal) nannies are closely correlated.
> I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required.
Having employed a couple of bad nannies, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Experienced nannies in high-cost-of-living areas do. Many charge $35 to $55 per hour [1][2][3] and at 45 hours a week, that is $82k to $129k a year or $6,825 to $10,725 a month.
> What was your experience with bad nannies?
Not wanting to pay the aforementioned prices and dealing with strong cigarette smoke smell on clothing, strong perfumes, buying them age-inappropriate toys, issues with timeliness, general messiness in our home, questionable unemployment claims, even a DUI. All the problems of an employee and roommate rolled into one.
All of them had prior experience, first aid training, and loved children so in retrospect I may have been overly harsh to refer to them as "bad nannies". But I still think it was absolutely worth the time and effort it took to find a good nanny.
[1] https://www.lighthouse-careers.com/blog/complete-nanny-salar...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/NannyEmployers/comments/1irv28o/nyc...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Nanny/comments/urmmqj/its_apparentl...
You're now limiting your price to high cost of living areas with extremely experienced nannies (even that 'hire for your yacht here' page you dug up only gets into these $72k+ prices at 8+ years of experience and specialized skills), and working overtime every week. And in those conditions - sure, but that is quite atypical. A normal search for 'us average nanny salary' turns up about a million hits in the $19-$23 hourly range. I imagine off the books is rather lower yet still on average.
And yeah it sounds like you had some remarkably bad luck with nannies. I take most of those, like showing up on time, completely for granted, and would certainly never hire a nanny who smokes. And it's not just the stink. I mean I don't even understand how that's supposed to work - how do you even nanny while also taking smoke breaks? Yeah, just ridiculous.