When Life Throws Curveballs: Building a Safety Net as a Family Day Care Educator

Season #4 March 06, 2025

Hello, my lovely listeners!

This week, I’m diving into something crucial for every family day care educator—being prepared for when things go wrong. Whether it’s natural disasters, unexpected closures, or financial hiccups, too many educators are one emergency away from financial stress.

This episode isn’t about fear—it’s about empowerment. It’s about taking control, planning ahead, and making sure you have the safety nets in place to protect yourself, your business, and your well-being. Because no one is coming to save you—you have to take charge of your own future.

What I Covered in This Episode:

Why Charging Your Worth is Essential

One of the biggest mistakes I see educators making? Undervaluing their work. You are not “profiting off the children” (let’s shut that idea down right now!). You are profiting off your hard work, your resources, and your expertise. And that’s how it should be! If you’re still operating at the CCS cap, you’re working below minimum wage—and that’s not sustainable.

The Importance of Emergency Funds

Imagine you had to close for a week—could you afford it? Having an emergency fund means you can take time off without stress. Even setting aside one day’s pay per season can make a difference.

Why You Need Income Protection & Disability Insurance

This is the one thing I want you to take action on today. Pick up the phone and call your super company. Make sure you have income protection and total permanent disability insurance. It’s a small cost now but could be life-changing if you ever need it.

How Clear Policies Can Save You From Stress

If you’re still accepting payments from families yourself, you NEED a strict policy in place. No more chasing unpaid fees! If a family won’t pay now, they won’t pay later. Have a clear payment policy, enforce it, and protect yourself from financial loss.

The Power of Community & Self-Care

Your support network matters. Whether it’s fellow educators, a professional mentor, or a trusted friend, having people to lean on can make all the difference. And don’t forget to look after yourself! Regular self-care (yes, even in the chaos!) helps you think clearly, problem-solve effectively, and avoid burnout.

5 Ways to Protect Yourself & Your Business

Charge your worth – Your work is valuable, and you deserve to be paid fairly.
Build a financial buffer – Start small, but start today.
Sort out your insurance – It’s not a “nice-to-have”, it’s a must.
Set clear policies & enforce them – Stop letting unpaid fees drain your income.
Lean on your community – Support makes all the difference.

A Few Final Thoughts:

Tough times will come—that’s life. But with the right financial, practical, and emotional safety nets, you can navigate challenges without spiralling into stress.

Your challenge this week: Call your super company. Check your insurance cover and make sure you’re protected. This is one small step that could make a huge impact on your future.

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going:

Did this episode hit home for you? What’s one thing you’re going to change in your family day care business to be better prepared? Send me a message or leave a comment—I’d love to hear from you!

Thanks for spending this time with me today. Let’s continue to advocate for slow, intentional, and heart-centred education.

Speak soon! 💛

Episode Transcript

When Life Throws Curveballs: Building a Safety Net as a Family Day Care Educator
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[00:00:00] Hello, hello and welcome to this week's podcast. I am recording from the beautiful Coolum beach on the eve of a cyclone Alfred coming through. I have some windows right next to me and I was debating whether to close them or not, but do you know what? If you hear a little bit of wind, I just want this to be captured somewhere along the way.

So I've decided to leave the window open. I'll probably regret it if the hair blows into my mouth and I choke, but you know, life, Sometimes. So I'm going to talk about today when things go wrong, like exactly this. And we've had a lot of it in the last few years, but I still see some people haven't put plans in place to protect them for when the proverbial hits the fan.

So that's what I want to talk with you about this week. So without further ado, let's get into it.

Hello, [00:01:00] hello and welcome to the Big Hearted Podcast. My name is Victoria Edmond and I am your host. Our aim here at the Big Hearted Podcast is to nurture a community of heart centered educators to change the perception and delivery of early childhood education and care in Australia and ultimately around the world.

We want you to be inspired by our guests and the topics we bring to you to think of new ways of being as an educator. We want you to feel a sense of belonging via this podcast so that you can engage any time of the day or night in any place that suits you. We want you to become an educator that delivers education from the heart as we believe this is how we create great change within our world.

So join us as we discover new ways to inspire each other here. On the big hearted podcast

Okay, so the very first thing that I want to get into talking about is [00:02:00] having financial safety nets sorted for yourself. This is so important. We have If you were doing family daycare during the fires, there was many that had to close their services. We then were interrupted by COVID and then some of us copped floods.

And then COVID was the gift that just kept on giving where families were here, there and everywhere. Some educators really managed to fill their spots and other educators lost families and it was just a whole. Um, and here we are again, and I know other educators have faced cyclones as well. You, you kind of forget about it when it hasn't happened to you.

But when it's happening to you, it feels like the world's falling down almost like I don't know about you, but my entire feed. In Facebook is just Tropical Cyclone Alfred because obviously [00:03:00] I'm friends with people that live in my area So everyone's like posting all the hints and tips and blah blah blah blah blah But it just reminds me again and I'm sitting here supposed to be doing our launch and I've decided to postpone the launch because I need to go home.

I don't want to get stuck up here and stuck away from Brian. He's got PTSD. He's struggling a little bit with, um, remember, like, just not being, me not being there. So it's challenging all around. And so I've made that really difficult decision to postpone, um, the launch and do it at another time. Uh, and again, it's, it's, life throws you lemons.

You've got to make a lemonade. So You can only make lemonade though if you've got the bandwidth and the mental capacity to not be enveloped in stress and fear. And that comes from prior planning. And this is an area that I see a lot of [00:04:00] family daycare educators really struggle with because so many of you are not charging your worth to start off with.

So you're already on the breadline. There's no chance of being able to have savings and contingency plan if you aren't charging what you need to charge to make your business profitable. And I will say it again and I've said it before and I'll keep saying it to you. You are not Profiting off the children.

That is the biggest load of BS I think I've ever come across in my entire life. You are profiting off the hard work that you do. You are profiting off the resources that you have purchased to provide, the programs that you're running. You are profiting off your hard work and there is absolutely nothing wrong with a family daycare educator running a business.

that is sustainable. And I'm not talking green sustainability, I'm talking your mental health sustainability, your financial [00:05:00] sustainability. Like, those are the two most important factors that we need to get our heads around. And I think there's some serious conversations we need to start having with services that are capping educators at the CCS cap.

They are literally asking you to work below pay. minimum wage. You cannot work for that and pay your super, pay your tax, put aside for your annual leave. All of these things are going to be the thing that helps you to maintain your mental capacity when the proverbial hits the fan. There are, there is no two ways about it and I am not mincing words around that because I'm starting to see posts already, oh my gosh if I close, I can't survive.

That's a perilous position to put yourself in. You are not running a business. You are working from an employee mentality. That someone else is looking after you. Guess what, [00:06:00] girlfriend? They're not. No one's coming to save you. You need to put these things in place for yourself. So, emergency funds. Having emergency funds put aside, and that might be that you put aside a day's worth of pay every season, so that you know that you've got that one or two days up your sleeve.

By the end of the year, you might have four days up your sleeve for when something goes wrong. You should already be putting aside for annual leave and sick leave as well. So, These things should be in place, but then having an emergency fund is super important as well, because when things like this happen, you can take four days off and not stress.

And know that your bills are covered and then if you have to you can go into annual leave. It's just the luck of the draw, it's the way it goes, but at least you've got it there covered. That's one less stress you have to worry about in times like this. So this is where it's really important that for those [00:07:00] of you who are still taking fees from families.

Oh, here comes the wind. I don't know if you can hear it, but it's gusting. If you're still taking family payments yourself until your service takes that over, you need to have a really strict policy. You deserve to be paid for the work that you do. I cannot say that any more forceful to you at all. And if you allow families, and I read a post the other day, and I'm really hopeful that this girl was putting an extra zero one.

But then a family owed her 15 grand in fees. I mean, that is ludicrous. That is like 300 a week for a whole year that this girl's let these families not pay for. Insanity. Absolutely insanity. And Why would you let yourself get into that position? You will never see that money. That family, if they didn't pay when they were using you, and now they've gone, they're not going to pay you.[00:08:00]

And you have to write that off as a bad debt. Like, what a crushing blow. That is a huge chunk off your mortgage. Or a huge chunk towards paying a car. Or a holiday. Because yes, you deserve to have holidays too. Like, where does this mentality come from that because you're a family daycare educator you don't get to take time off?

Come on friends, we've got to shift this, we've got to change it. One thing you should consider and seriously do it because I am right now in the process of claiming these payments for my husband is total permanent disability insurance and income protection insurance through your super. It is a small payment every week, and you can pay extra into your super, get the government to match that, and so have a higher level of income protection insurance and total permanent disability insurance.

Call your super, get it on your super account, or go through another [00:09:00] broker and get it somewhere else, but you must have it. You never know when stuff is going to go wrong. Two and a half years my husband has not worked for. Like, we need this stuff so much. And no one is looking out for us. So, I just really want you to really get it.

Clearly, that this is a priority and one you must, must get on top of. It's a simple phone call to sort it out, and then you know you're protected should you have an injury. That doesn't happen at work. And you can't work. You get sick and you can't work. Like, this is where you call on your income protection insurance.

You know, God forbid you have a car accident and, and you're maimed and you can't work any longer. Total disability insurance will kick in for you. Total permanent disability insurance is a game changer and a lifesaver. You want to make sure that you get the cover so that it's [00:10:00] going to cover at least your mortgage payments.

Pay off your mortgage. You know, get that so you've always got a roof over your head. Like, I hope I'm preaching to the converted. I really truly do. But if I'm not, please make that phone call today. Okay, the next part that I really want to touch on is clarity around your policies and procedures. So much stress comes when people don't know what they're doing.

What do we do in this case? Have any of you looked at the policies and procedures that your service has? Has your service contacted you and shared what the plan is? If they haven't, you've got the information, you just need to have a look at it. Uh, go and like the Department of Education page in your state.

They will have some information as well. But be warned, they are chronically last minuters. They will not put out anything out there about an emergency closure until they're [00:11:00] 100 percent certain that it's going to happen. Okay, so, and they don't do it early because, particularly in a tropical cyclone, it could change course at last minute, and it might hit somewhere different, um, it might fizzle into drizzle, I love that saying now, fizzle into drizzle, but they don't say it until it's 100 percent last minute because the Disruption that that causes when schools close and all these sorts of things happen Um is is pretty remarkable and they can't lock things in Okay, so we're talking about policies and procedures.

I'm sorry, I've had two phone calls that I've had to pause you for and one of them was all the things that were going wrong when credit cards are hacked and they get closed and you're traveling. So these things happen in life all the time and you cannot prevent these things from happening but But having a plan and prior [00:12:00] preparation really helps to solve these issues.

I really hope you can hear the whistling wind. But if you're watching the YouTube, you'll be seeing my hair flying away, because it is breezy. Okay, so, um, Policies. They are there to protect you. They are there to tell you what to do if you can't get an immediate answer from somebody. It's really important that you know how to access these and read them regularly.

Because they are going to guide your decision making. And it's also very helpful when things go wrong in terms of parents not paying. If you've got a clear fee paying policy, you don't really even have to say anything. You can just give it to them and go, let's look at the policy together. This is what it says.

It's here, we follow this all the time. Okay, so having these things in place is really helpful. Also forward thinking to what might I need to put in place? Should I have a parent that doesn't pay me? And having some Handling procedures that you have in, in place for yourself. Maybe it's a [00:13:00] text message, then you have an email and you might have these already scripted because then it's going to take you out of that.

I know a lot of people are activated when something goes wrong, when something goes wrong, they get like caught up. They get nervous. They don't like confrontation. If you're in a good place and you think, well. What would I like to say to somebody if they were late paying their fee? I'm just going to set myself a little script, a little pre written text message that I send to my families and I'm also then going to, pardon me, going to follow that up with an email and you might pre write that so that when the time comes, you don't have to stress about it.

You just go to something that you've already written and it takes the pressure away. Right. These are the things that we can do to help each help ourselves in these situations having weather and emergency plans and Regularly practicing these I know the Queensland Department of Education told us that their interpretation of Evacuation and [00:14:00] lockdown procedures is that you practice what's on the risk assessment for your space and it's a really good idea It feels a little a little bit arbitrary because you get out when you get out.

Like, does it matter why you're getting out? I kind of don't see the value in practicing with a particular purpose, but I don't know, maybe it might come in handy at some point, but regularly practicing these and enacting these are going to make it muscle memory for you so that it's really easy for you to, uh, do if you have to.

Um, some of you are going to be able to have like relief educator networks that you can utilize, which is great when, when it's available for your service. Um, you can minimize the disruption to your business, which is always a super bonus. So ensuring that you have those, and if you're going on holidays, putting it out there and getting the right person to be able to manage your clients and your families is the [00:15:00] best possible way to do it.

Look having self care plans and regularly looking after your health, like part of the reason why I launch up in Noosa is because My chiropractor, and it's a non cracking chiro, lives up here and practices up here. So I come up here, I've had four sessions in the last two days, because I know that my nervous system totally needs to have that touch point, that relaxation, and it is an ongoing thing for me.

I come up. I haven't, but I will be, coming up regularly to ensure that my nervous system is clear and that my body and my brain functions efficiently. Um, like sleep. Sleep is so critical, not just for the children, but for you too. When you have a lack of sleep, things always seem worse than what they actually are.

So having that in place is super important. Those regular check ins with yourself. Maybe you do some journaling, you know, having [00:16:00] strategies, time off, supervision, therapy, peer support, all these things are really important that you make sure that you have. Um, I said it last night in the helicopter to hands off.

A coach is one of the quickest way to really elevate your business and your practice because they're not emotionally attached to what's going on and they'll tell you the hard truths. The things you already know that you don't want to admit to, they would tell it to you and in a loving way that will kind of give you nowhere to go but to address it and move forward.

We need that. It's totally, totally needed. And that's like professional development, you know, having those ongoing trainings in conflict resolution, business management, stress management, um, they can all build resilience. And that's what we really need after the last. This is the last five years. Can you believe we're saying it?

The last five years, it's just been one thing after another. But this is life. Life, lives. And this is what happens when life, lives. You've just got to have the resources [00:17:00] available. And if you are burnt out, you don't have those resources. So it's really, really important that you get this happening. Um, and put these things in place.

Because when you come to situations like this, you've got bandwidth, you've got the capacity to problem solve and go hmm, that's not going to work, what do I need to do instead? So communication and relationship building is really important. So your relationships Don't just have to be with family daycare educators.

They can be with other professionals that can like for me, my Cairo is a great place to bounce ideas off and for her to give me feedback as to what's going in my system. I go, Oh, that makes sense. Because actually I've been really thinking about that and, Oh yeah, I totally, yeah, I can see where that's coming from.

I know why my body is doing that now. And then I can bring conscious awareness to it and move through those. a lot quicker than if I don't bring awareness to them at all. So keeping families [00:18:00] informed too, that whole idea around communication is super important. Don't gate keep the information, share it with them because sometimes someone will just give you something back and it just.

Gives you that last piece of the puzzle and go, I know how to fix this problem now. Yes, that was awesome feedback Thank you, but it also keeps you in that position of authority in your own business So keeping that communication with families is super important and helps to avoid Misunderstanding. So conflict resolution skills too are really important because when you know what you need to do in a certain situation It reduces the stress And it's a really important piece.

And I have a difficult conversations course that I'll be putting out there very, very soon. So you can partake in that. It's got templates and a workbook and all the rest of it with it as well. Um, and being part of a community, like I, I can see it on my Facebook feed. There's people that have like the full.

Solar power set up like we live [00:19:00] in the mountains. So we lose power all the time So there's people up there that are like, yep. I've got solar power. Anyone's welcome to come here We've got a spring or whatever it is. They've got access to heaps of water So yeah, can't have a shower, charge your devices, come hang out, have a cup of tea Blah blah blah blah blah like nothing like a, like a, like community wide Situation brings communities together, small communities like this And it's really heartwarming to see that we have that in family daycare too.

We have a wonderful community within our family daycare within Australia. And, you know, lean on us. We're here to help each other and support each other. Um, yeah, so I just thought they were some of the ideas that we could cover in today's podcast so that it might be helpful for you. Possibly a little bit too late, but, um, to deal with.

It's impending cyclone, but in saying that, the thing that I want you to do, if you [00:20:00] take nothing else away from this today, I want you to take away that you're going to go and phone your super company and ensure that you have income protection insurance and total permanent disability insurance on your super.

It's not going to cost you a great deal at the end of the day. You're not going to miss it. Make an additional payment to cover it if you have to. Like I think mine costs. Um, it's like five bucks extra a week or something. Like, I am so happy to pay that because then I get a payout if I ever get into a position where I need it.

And I was of the, uh huh, I'll never need that. We need it. My husband needs it right now. Uh, I wish we had have looked at his before because I would have upped it and had better. income protection or, or total disability protection rather. But what we've got is enough to get us by. So, don't be like me.

Don't do what [00:21:00] I do. Do what I say. And get yourself sorted because it's really important and it will just give you peace of mind. Well, friends, that's it. I'm off to pack up my stuff and get myself home and, uh, I hope that you're safe. I hope that you're well. Uh, we will be catching up very, very soon. Uh, and I wish you hunker down and stay safe friends.

And if you're watching from afar, send all the love. I did see someone created a Facebook group that they're going to go out and stand and blow at the cyclone to blow it back. I'll join that group. All right. My beautiful friends, you have a fabulous day, whatever you're doing, wherever you are, and I look forward to talking with you soon.

Big love, everybody. Bye. [00:22:00]