I was 12 years into a big, challenging career. I enjoyed the work, but the stress and long hours drove me to burnout a couple times a year. So I was ready for a change of pace.
I found an old book called Six Months Off, and it inspired me to take action. I planned a 3-month trip to Spain with my wife and daughter in the summer of 2020. A mini retirement, I called it.
We were going to immerse ourselves in Basque culture, become fluent in Spanish, and have the time of our lives! We told our bosses and arranged for backfills at work. Booked flights and Airbnb apartments in 4 different cities. And were ready to go, when COVID-19 brought our plans crashing down in March, 2020.
If my mini retirement wasn’t canceled by a global pandemic, life would be different now. I wanted to take a second, longer mini retirement about 5 years later. But it wasn’t meant to be.
Instead, I left my job altogether in 2022, moved to the mountains in Colorado, and started PathwayToFI to share my knowledge and experiences with others.
Here’s what I learned about mini retirements. Why a mini retirement might be right for you. And how to take one that’s uniquely your own.
Why take a mini retirement?
Our culture has driven us to very long work hours. And we’re often tethered to our phone day and night. In my busiest years, it was common for me to work 10-hour days and 50-hour weeks.
The average American worked 38.7 hours per week in 2021 according to this article, referencing a study by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. But that includes part-time workers. Many Americans haven’t worked anything under a 50-hour week for years!
Turkey and Columbia, at 48 hours, have the highest average workweeks. The Netherlands and Denmark have the lowest, at 29 and 32 hours respectively.
It’s no wonder that the Netherlands and Denmark consistently rank in the top 5 happiest countries in the world, while Columbia recently came in at 51st and Turkey at 102nd. The US currently sits at 19th.
In addition to this, 45% of Americans get only 2 weeks of vacation a year. 9% get no vacation. And they have an average of 9.5 days of unused vacation by the end of the year, according to this article.
A decade or more of stressful work at a pace like this can have long-term effects on health. High stress can lead to lost sleep, poor nutrition, obesity and mental illness. The human mind and body need rest, which is hard to achieve when we’re working so much.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to take a mini retirement. There are other things we can do to find a more sustainable pace of life as well. So before you assume the only way out is a 3-month trip to Spain, let’s look at your options.
Other options
There are 3 main options to slow down in life:
- Work part-time instead of full-time
- Take mini retirements
- Retire early
All of these require some level of financial stability.
Early retirement obviously requires the most money because you may not work for an income ever again. That means you’ll have to work longer before you’re ready to make the leap.
Working part-time might take the fewest resources at first. But if you jump back into full-time work after a mini retirement, you can quickly catch up to where you would have been as a part-timer.
My wife has worked part-time for over 7 years. She loves it. In fact, she’s learning that many of her male co-workers are now doing the same! This inspired me to write Part-Time Work Is the New Early Retirement. As I explained there, going part-time before you decide to leave the workforce entirely has many benefits.
If part-time work isn’t what you’re looking for, and full retirement seems like what you want, a mini retirement is a good way to test it. Put one foot in the water before jumping all the way in.
Is a mini retirement right for you?
Do you need a break that’s longer than the standard 1- or 2-week vacation?
Do you find yourself more stressed at work after your vacation than you were before you went?
Is there something that you need to do in life that won’t happen if you continue your current course for 10 or 20 more years?
Explore the world. Climb Everest. Walk the Camino de Santiago. Race an Ironman. Write a novel. Record an album. Build a cabin with your own hands. Learn to paint with oils, cook French food, or sail a boat.
These are all great reasons to consider a mini retirement.
A mini retirement is great for rest, exploration, and accomplishment. It’s great for finishing a project that you just can’t find time for in normal life. And it’s great for re-evaluating your life and how you’re spending it.
At the end of your mini retirement, you may decide to move, get a new job, change careers, go back to school, or retire!
My wife and I knew we wanted to make a major change and live life differently. We saw mini retirements as a way to experiment with life changes.
Even now, as we’ve moved to a place we loved to vacation and I created a second career as a writer and financial coach, we’re testing that change. So far, it’s awesome!
But we knew that we could turn it from a full-blown life change to a mini retirement. All I would need to do is get my job back. This time, though, it would be remote and in a different role.
Mini retirements give you options to make your life what you want it to be!
How to take a mini retirement
So you’ve decided you want to take a mini retirement. But you don’t even know where to start. Here’s what you need to do.
First, know how you want to spend your time
The last thing you want is to return to work after your mini retirement and feel like it was a waste of time.
It’s okay if you get bored for a few days and wish you could go back to work. That’s a sign that you’ve recovered from the stress of your job and are ready to return. But it’s not okay if you have no idea what to do on day one!
There’s no limit to what you can do on your mini retirement. I gave some examples of the things that might be motivating you. But don’t pick from someone else’s list! Whatever you choose, make sure it’s something that you can’t wait to start. If you’re not excited about it now, it probably isn’t the best use of your time off.
Brainstorm with your spouse, if you have one. Your spouse needs to be on board for this to work.
You may want to spend your time differently. So make sure you’re both doing something you want. Even if that means splitting time between your activity and your spouse’s activity.
Or maybe you’re the one taking a mini retirement and your spouse is continuing on. That’s fine as long as your spouse supports what you’re doing.
If you don’t have a spouse, bounce ideas off your closest friend or family member. You may want to take someone else along with you to share your journey! Or you may just need someone to confirm that you’re making a wise decision and are prepared to go for it.
Leave space in your days
Don’t fill every minute of every day during your mini retirement. You might need a week or a month of nothing but rest and recovery before your mind and body are ready to take on the main goal of your time off.
And don’t overwork yourself in the same way you did in your job. You might need to limit how hard you work on your mini retirement project. How much you study or train in a single day. How fast you travel. Whatever you do, do it at a sustainable pace with plenty of rest mixed in.
Talk to your employer
Unless you’re really close with your boss, telling them you want 3, 6, or 12 months off will be one of the hardest parts about planning your mini retirement. It will be much easier if you have been a strong performer for many years. And if you bring a good proposal for how your work will get done in your absence. Assuming you want your job back, of course.
Don’t have the conversation until you’ve thought of what’s in it for them.
Make it a win-win!
Can you legitimately say that you’ll grow as an employee because of it? Maybe you’re picking up a new skill, like a foreign language or writing and presentation abilities, that will benefit them.
Will your short absence give another employee an opportunity to grow? Your employer might see that as a positive.
Are you stepping away during a lean time in the business? You might be saving them money between contracts and allowing them to find more business before they have layoffs!
One reason this should be good for them is that you need it so you can perform at the top of your game. You’ll come back rejuvenated and motivated to continue earning and growing your career.
If you are doing something that complements your job, such as finishing a degree or learning a related skill, then you could frame your time off as a sabbatical rather than a personal leave of absence. In that case, you might be able to negotiate with them to pay for some of your time or activities. You might also get them to keep you on the employer benefits. It never hurts to ask!
Automate your business
If you run a business and work for yourself, you need to make it work without you.
Is your business seasonal? Or is it one with low overhead that can easily stop and re-start? Then maybe you can take your mini retirement during the off-season and just leave an out-of-office message to clients until you return.
Otherwise, you probably need a capable manager that can run it while you’re away. So you may need to hire and train one before making a mini retirement possible.
It’s okay if you have to take a call once a week or twice a month. But if you’re constantly checking email and making decisions, your mini retirement won’t be successful at all.
You need to be focused on the objective of your time off, not on the stressful work that you’re recovering from.
Make sure that you have systems in place, so every decision doesn’t have to go through you. Write the instruction manual on how you handle every operation if you have to. If you don’t have this already, it’s a valuable tool that you should want for your business anyway.
I had a knowledgeable property manager for my rental property business before planning my mini retirement. I worked with her for years, and trusted that she would be able to make good decisions without me. She would only contact me for major repairs above a certain dollar threshold. And to tell me about an emergency that is already being handled.
In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss describes how automating his business caused it to make more money with less effort. This might happen for you too!
Automating your business and getting it to profit without you also turns it into something you could sell one day. That’s a great exit strategy if you don’t want to actively run your business for another 20 years!
Increasing profits and turning your business into something you can sell are great. But you might be perfectly happy if your business doesn’t profit while you’re gone. In that case, you just need to have enough money saved and invested already.
Get your finances ready
The biggest consideration for most people who want to take a mini retirement is financial. How are you going to pay for everything?
You don’t need to be financially independent to take a mini retirement. But you need to be in good shape. A mini retirement shouldn’t put you into debt or keep you from retiring when you’re no longer willing or able to work.
How much you need depends on what you’re doing during the mini retirement itself. And whether you have a job waiting for you when you return.
Estimate how much your mini retirement will cost
Does your mini retirement involve staying home and living a similar lifestyle to your current one? Then you can just look at how much you’re spending now and multiply it out.
Will you be leaving your home for months? You’ll have to pay for regular housing costs plus living costs wherever you’re going. Consider offsetting those costs by renting your home to someone while you’re gone.
If you’re planning to move after the mini retirement, maybe you need to sell your house or end your lease and put things in storage while you travel.
Make sure to factor in health insurance. If it’s something that your employer helps pay for, you’ll be paying the whole cost under COBRA until you return. Or you may want a different health insurance plan if your current plan doesn’t cover you in the countries where you’ll be traveling.
Have enough slack to cover unknowns
If you might not have a job when you get back, add a few months of expenses to cover the time that it might take to find a new job.
If you’re really uncertain how much the mini retirement will cost you, add another 10% or 20% to your budget to make sure you don’t run out of money while you’re out having fun.
Keep an emergency fund in addition to all this. A mini retirement isn’t an emergency. It’s something you can plan for. It isn’t a reason to dip into emergency savings, which you’ll need just as much during and after your time off.
What I estimated for my mini retirement in Spain
My family planned for about $30k in expenses for our 3 months in Spain. Our home was paid off, and we could cut services like internet and trash. So operating our home would only cost another $2k for utilities and insurance. Health insurance was another $3k. So we needed about $35k to take our mini retirement, without dipping into our $15k emergency fund.
That’s a big number when your paycheck stops! But our rental properties would continue to cash flow about $2k/month, giving us a small income to offset house and health insurance expenses. And our retirement accounts were in great shape. So we weren’t eating into our net worth too much.
For us, $35k and 3 months of lost income was a small price to pay for the rest, experience, and life-long memories that our mini retirement would create.
Summary
A mini retirement can be one of the happiest, most rewarding times in life. It allows you to do things you might never have a chance to do when you’re older. And to find rest in the middle of a challenging and stressful career.
After your mini retirement, you might change everything about your life. Or you might happily return to life as it was, with more energy and enthusiasm. Either way, you won’t regret the experiences that made you want a mini retirement in the first place.
Before you go, make sure you:
- Know how you want to spend your time
- Talk to your employer and negotiate with them
- Automate your business
- Get your finances ready
If you enjoyed this article, read How to Make Your Dream Life a Reality next.
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