Welcome to Had of Money.
I'm Joel and I am Matt, and today we're talking about why you should retire on the reg with Jillian John's.
Rude Yeah, you know, I think one of the biggest hurdles to overcome here in the United States, but not just like in our country, but also even for regular listeners on the podcast is the word retirement, because, like, what do you think of when you hear that someone is retiring, Like I know, I think of someone who's maybe a bit older, they're at least past their prime, They've put in several decades of hard work and now
they're just totally hanging it up. And then on top of that, if you attempt to picture yourself in that situation, I think it's often so far away that it's difficult to even have any connection to that future version of yourself. But these are the types of problems that our friend Jillian loves to help walk folks through. She writes over at retire often dot com, she hosts podcast by the same name, and as a mother of a bunch of children,
Jillian herself grew up in poverty. She wants folks to know that many retirement is more of a possibility than you think. And so we're excited to talk about retiring on the RAG. We're excited to talk about sabbaticals with Jillian today. Jillian, thank you for joining the podcast.
I'm excited to be here.
Thanks.
We're excited to have you back. We were just talking about how you were I think our first for real guests, Uh huh had the money back in the day. This was many, many years ago. Yeah, so it's fun to get to talk to you again like this. But the first question we won't link to that episode. I'm sure Jillian had a lot of good things to say, but yeah, yeah, I'm sure she did.
But just given awkward, man, we were so fresh and green at that point that it pains me to even think about that conversation.
Hure percentury.
So, Jilly, I don't even remember what you said when we asked you this question, and I'm pretty sure we're asking this question even if.
I don't even know if you want I don't even know.
But the question we ask now everybody who comes on the show is what's your craft beer equivalent? What is it that you are spending more money on than some people would think is sane? While you're being smart and saving and investing for your future at the same time.
Yeah, that's gardening. It's plants. I go to nurseries and home depot and lows and it's like it's pretend money. It might as well be monopoly money. I don't even think of it as real. The only limitation that I put on myself when it comes to plants is I have to eventually be able to plant them in the ground. So like my physical labor is kind of the parameters
of how many how many plants I purchase. It's also my stress purchasing, Like if I'm having a really bad week, I go and buy seeds online or the I order trees. It's also, yeah, kind of my impulse stress purchase.
So, speaking of seeds, have you ever heard of or ordered from, or been to. I think it's called Bakersfield Seed Bank or something like that.
It's out in.
California and literally Kate and I were getting into gardening when we were out there on a road trip and it was literally an old timey bank. It's like this like picture green gots that they converted into a seed bank, and it was goblins run things there too. Yeah, yeah, goblins with green pounds. But they've got like a lot of heirloom varieties and stuff like that.
I was on my phone yesterday and my mom's like, are you looking at sheds? I was like, no, this is my secret Instagram account that is just entirely plants and gardeners. That's that's all I've curated over here.
I love it. I love it. Okay.
I feel like at least my wife and you, Jillian could talk about plants all day.
For sure. I certainly help her out. I think I think some of the bigger holes.
But we're going to talk about retiring, and let's start with definitions. Retiring often that is such a passion of yours, But what exact fact is it?
Like what do you.
Define as a the frequency of retiring, and like what do you how do you define many retirements specifically.
Especially because vacations, right, that's vacation many retirement.
Yeah, So I have kind of three parameters for what classifies as a mini retirement, and I use the terms interchangeably. Whether it's many retirements, sabbatical, career break, hiatus. All of them are good. But the three things is that it's a month or longer you're stepping away from your primary career to focus on something that really matters to you. And if you have those three elements, for my own personal definition, I consider that a mini retirement.
Okay, So a vacation typically in the US at least is like a week once a year, maybe twice a year if you're one of the lucky folks. We Matt and I lament about the statistics that most people don't take all their vacation time. It's really it's really sad. And if it's less, if it's a short period of time, that typically means that you're not disconnecting from work in the way you need to to kind of reset your
brain and get some actual rest. So is that part of why the month is such an important parameter a month or longer.
Yeah, there's a kind of physical down shift to help people get into that state of rest. And I find when people are really burned out, you know, it's adrenaline and it's cortisol, and they're running at this heightened state. And just like taking caffeine, the minute you stop drinking your coffee, the caffeine does not leave your system. You know, there's a time period before you kind of start to
settle down. And it's the same with work. The minute you walk out of the office, you're not completely self regulated. So I find usually around week two or week three people really start to relax and settle in. But a month is also enough time to do something really significant and interesting in with your time.
So first of all, I love that you've defined the fact that there's like a half life to your work.
Once you step away from it, just like there is with Cavin.
But on your podcast, like you've interviewed a whole lot of folks about this, and I'm curious, like, what have those folks mentioned as being I guess that maybe the best part of their time stepping away, or maybe could you share some good, just encouraging or inspirational examples of what some folks were able to accomplish, or maybe some life decisions that were made, or maybe they found.
Themselves out of just like kind of fork in the road.
I would love to for you to share some examples from the folks that you've talked with on your podcast.
Yeah. Absolutely, I have my podcast. I do one on one end group coaching, so I get to have lots and lots of these conversations and I always encourage people to pick kind of three intentions or three goals for their time, because there can be a temptation of I have this huge backlog of things, and I'm going to accomplish thirty different things during this time off, and because you don't have that focus, none of it really feels like you made good progress or really significant. So pick
kind of three. I would say the top ones are extended travel, you know, things that you can't really do in a four day or seven day vacation. I met a couple ones who were biking through Croatia, like an amazing trip, but it's not a four day weekend travel. Extended travel, it's not doing something really cool and interesting with their kids, having real quality time. You know. I did a ten week trip in a pop up camper through ten national parks with my kid. I was a
few years ago. There again, not something I can fit in into two weeks vacation, but really significant. In America, recovering from burnout rest burnout's a massive issue, so that hits the top of a lot of people's priority focusing on their health, whether that's losing weight or training for a marathon, or even their mental health. You know, trying to go to therapy and get some of that stuff
unpacked can be really helpful. A lot of people use it for a career transition too, you know, they're in that midpoint to their career where they're like, wait, am I really going to do this for the rest of my life? Like? Do I have another twenty years of this in me? But when you're burned out and when you're overwhelmed with work, it's really hard to imagine what else is even out there, what else might you enjoy?
And so they need kind of that decompression time to recover from burnout, to just have the creativity to explore new options.
So you kind of hinted at our work obsessed culture, and it's just kind of a barrier, I would think, just convincing people that this is a good idea. When we're on this kind of Hampshire wheel merry go round, it's kind of hard to just jump off. So do you find that as an obstacle trying to people understand that this is as a necessity in the first place.
You know, I think a lot of people intuitively know that they need a break or that they want to break. It's not hard to convince someone of like, hey, would you like to spend a month in France? Or you know, do you do you want to buy a bike right across the country or build out your garden for a month, you know, whatever people are passionate about. And the reality is, with our modern work culture, those hobbies, those interests, those things that we want to pursue, those things that matter
to us sometimes get entirely squeezed out of life. There's just not enough time. There's not enough hours in the day, there's not enough vacation days to do those in meaningful ways, which starts to exasperate this problem in that our work occupies so much of our life that it becomes so much of our identity and it's tough to build an identity outside of work.
Yeah, I completely agree. We talk about this all the time. How gosh, this makes me even think of something I read recently too about work crushes and how they're like very common because of course, when you are spending so much time at work, it's like you have individuals that you're drawn to. But that's like a whole other conversation.
Well, there's usually rules about that not dating in the workplace, and people are like.
What am I supposed to do? This is where I'm spending most.
Of the You're spending all your time there, and so it makes sense that, like relationally and emotionally, you feel pulled in that direction. But of course when it comes to your skill sets and the things that you are spending your time doing, it makes sense that you get really good at doing your job, and so it's hard to disentangle like our identity from the work that we're doing.
But like, I think one of the reasons folks have a hard time pulling away is because they're practically thinking, well, if I prioritize a many retirement, that's going to hurt
my career. It's going to hurt my earning potential. What would you say to somebody who's who's making that argument, Because I don't know, maybe I'm leading the witness here, but almost feel like that there's an argument to be made for the opposite that perhaps because I mean, you've already mentioned how they can foster career transition, but just talk to us about that about career potential or just the career path that someone might be on and trying to escape that hamster wheel.
Yeah, it's interesting because it is a little counterintuitive, but over and over I've seen the pattern of a mini retirement accelerating their professional growth and accelerating their financial progress, which it does feel a little counterintuitive, but on the professional side, I think it's I think it's pretty well known that one of the best ways to get a twenty to thirty percent raise is to switch jobs, and a mini retirement provides the perfect motivation and kind of
the perfect rest opportunity in between those jobs. So, especially if you're early in your career and you're going to be switching company every three or four years, that's a perfect little little moment in time that you can take a month or two to focus on these other areas of your life. And there's a really interesting phenomenon that I never would have guessed until I started having hundreds of conversations with people about this. But it makes people
really uncomfortable when you're not working. There's something about the work culture that it just feels wrong you not working, them still working and you not working is very, very uncomfortable, and sometimes it's subconscious. But when you step away from a job and you don't jump into a brand new job, a whole bunch of people start trying to get you a job. They try to like fix this, whether you
want them to or not. Early retirees experience us all of the time when like everyone and their network's trying to suck them back into corporate life. But there's ways that you can foster that as well, and oftentimes people get much better jobs, I think because that cognitive loop is open and where when jobs come open, they might not think of you if you're happy at a company, but if they're like, oh, isn't Joel off doing that thing? What's he doing? He's in Europe right, he probably wants
to get back to work. Maybe we should give him a call, and so you can kind of encourage his natural phenomenon, and people oftentimes get much more interesting jobs, jobs that they're better suited for, and better paying jobs. I hung out with a friend in DC who had just finished a mini retirement and two cool things about this story. One, when he came back to work to his new job, he had a fifty percent raise over his previous job. Wow, he had taken a year off.
His sign on bonus covered like half of the cost of his mani retirement. But the other thing was interesting during that time off, he rested, he recovered, he did hobbies, all of that, but he also explored other career options and then started taking classes and getting the certifications that he would need to pivot into a new career and did it well enough that he got a job offer in this new career. Ultimately, he decided to go back
to his previous career. But he's like, yeah, you know, I might be here for a year or two and then maybe I will switch careers. Like now I know I can do this.
That's cool. Kind of proved it to himself a little bit.
Yeah, and I love what you said too, just how well, first of all, it would be me making the calls to Joel, just like, dude, you haven't showed up to work in like three months, Like what's the deal.
Here, buddy? And I wouldn't take his calls.
But that being said, when he did come back, like how interesting of a conversation?
What do we have?
Like I guess I like the part of it too where it's almost like this forbidden it's this forbidden fruit that before I didn't really care, but now that I can't have you, I want to like we got to, but it's.
Almost like kind of how comedians and musicians need to live life in order to make good content right like, and I think the same is true for like life right to be appealing in so many of those ways, you have to go live a little or you just become the person who knows how to do the basic math and not kind of the interesting creative parts of a job.
So I see a lot of benefit in that. I'm curious, too, Gilly.
You, what about our consumption culture, how does that fuel our inability to take time off? Because think about it, we see the stats people living paycheck to paycheck, even people who make six plus figures. Is just kind of the fact that we don't know how to rein in our spending. Does that prevent us from having some of that financial flexibility to take an extended period of time off.
So one of the things that I talk about in my group coaching is this time luxury continuum and the phenomenon that if you have less time, you tend to want more luxury, but if you have more time, you
don't really need as much luxury. And so I think it's it ties in with the consumption in that when we have so little time, we have to spend so much money on everything, on having groceries delivered, on convenience food, on ordering new clothes online, Like every part of our life gets more expensive, and when we travel, it gets
more expensive to do. You know, a five day trip to Paris for a family of four is a huge cost, probably a similar cost for a family of four to live in France for a month, And so oftentimes when you have more time things aren't is expensive, And so sometimes people try to extrapolate their vacation costs. While a vacation costs me five thousand dollars a week, a month long mini retirement will cost me twenty it will not
cost you twenty thousand dollars. Like because you don't have to rush, you don't have to see three sights every day, you don't have to eat out three meals a day for the next thirty days in a row. Most people don't want to eat out ninety meals in a row, so the cost comes down because you can enjoy all of the other elements of life.
I totally agree, and I think there's something to be said to in the same way that we get sucked into the work and that keeps us from being able to being able to realize what it is that's making us happy. Sometimes I think we get sucked into the same consumption traps as well. That doesn't allow us to look up from from the grind that we're living in a day in and day out. Jillian, you, as well as a lot of our friends, Joel and I were
all kind of a part of the fire community. Whether or not we're like tangent to it or fully in it or not, I guess maybe it depends on the year, But I think there are a lot of folks within that community that might say that a mini retirement, well, hey, that's gonna that's gonna delay my ability to achieve full
financial independence. Fat fire. What would you say to those folks who are instead of looking at retirement at age sixty five, You know they've got the noble task of maybe going after it by the age of forty or fifty, but they're so fixated.
On their number. What would you say to those folks?
Yeah, this is a common hesitation, And honestly, I think many retirements are the perfect compliment to retiring early. And so's there's two kind of ways to look at this. One. If you are early in your financial independence journey. Like I said in the like the three qualifiers for what a mini retirement is. One of them is stepping away from your primary career. That doesn't mean that you have to do nothing. There were too many retirements that we used to buy a rental property and to renovate it.
That was a big undertaking for us and it wasn't something that we were able to do alongside our nine to five careers. So we took these two small gaps and that massively accelerated our path too five. Some people use their mini retirement to start a side hustle, to start a side project, to start kind of that business that they've been thinking about but they just didn't have the bandwidth to do it after work. And so you
can create additional sources of income. So, especially if you're early in your career or early in your financial journey, I would consider it doesn't have to be a beach in the Caribbean for a month, like there's lots of different things you can do with this time. But the second for the second group, if you're because I've worked with a lot of people who are like seventy percent of the way to find eighty nine and it's like, ah,
do I really want to take a break? I could just like keep my head down, push through for a couple more years, and then I'm one hundred percent there. But achieving financial independence is a little bit like driving down the interstate eighty miles an hour. If you pop that thing in reverse all at once, it's a little bit of a tailspin. There's a whole bunch of things that you maybe have not practiced or have kind of
set aside in your pursuit of financial independence. Maybe some of those relationships, maybe some of those hobbies, those interests that travel you've kind of postponed, thinking well, I'll just really do all of that when I get to five. And the reality is it's tough to change, like to significantly change one thing in your life. It takes a lot of work and effort, and it's not always enjoyable.
If your plan is I'm going to change fifteen things in my life as soon as I become fie, it's a rough transition and it's very discouraging for a lot of people. Fail even just like the failure rate of hobbies. You know, you try a new hobby and not all of them work out, Not all of them are what
you expect same of volunteering. So you go from a career where you're very proficient and really good at everything and very successful to a life where you're like mostly failing at stuff, and a lot of people it brings up, you know, whether you retire at sixty five, whether you retire early, sometimes even during a mini retirement. One of the things I warned people about is it allows you
to unpack baggage. So it's like if your kitchen's really messy, but you go to work all day and you don't have to look at the messy kitchen, it's easy to pretend it doesn't even exist during your time off. Now you just stare at that messy kitchen all day long, and so it's an opportunity to clean that stuff up.
But I know a lot of people who worked so hard for ten or fifteen years, head down, push through to retire early, only six months or a year later to be like this sucks, I'm going back to work. And it's like if you would have practiced retirement periodically throughout the process, that transition not only would be easier, but it would be so much more successful.
I guess sometimes it's easier to do the thing that you're really good at that you kind of disliked.
Us exactly trying to practice the things you're not great at.
It's just like nobody likes to suck at anything, right, No, like so much of our lives. I feel like you've gotten better. A cappella music comett, but I sucked. No, No, I don't sing, but like, yeah, like it goes back to the doing the things that you're proficient and nobody
it's really difficult. It's humbling, Like you have to get over that ego to say, you know what, even though I'm so good at this thing and I make a lot of money, you're like hitting the reset the reset button, and you're basically starting over at beginner's, beginner level, novice status on a bunch of other different things. And I think a lot of folks would much rather continue to be proficient and at the sort of a claim expert
level at the thing that they know and love. But maybe that they're beginning to resent.
Think that the people around them value too, because in this culture, that is what gets put on a pedestal is professional success in the work workplace environment, more money in the bank account, and so it's like, cool, let me keep doing the thing that everyone else thinks is great that I'm actually pretty good at, and I feel good about myself. Chilie, we have more questions we want to discuss about retiring often and how we actually what are the specifics of how we actually pull that off?
Do we have to like put in our resignation. Tomorrow we'll talk about that and more.
Right after this, we are back from the break talking with.
Her friend Gillian.
John's rude and Jillian like, so far, like in the first portion of the episode, you've made a really good case I think for why folks should be considering many retirements. But let's talk about more of the nuts and bolts. I guess the practical side of how we go about.
Doing this thing.
So let's say that someone's convinced, how does how does one get prepared? One does not simply walk into mordor right? How do you take off a significant chunk of time? Is this something where someone should just say yeah, like hand in their two weeks? Notice, like, should you just straight up quit? Or maybe should someone try to negotiate a leave of absence? I guess what I'm asking here is how should they negotiate the relationship that we have with the current employer.
So there's two options. If you want to come back to your employer, which honestly, I will always recommend starting small because it's the easiest step and it'll give you that confidence and clarity to kind of go bigger next time. But a month off negotiated from your employer, go do something cool, go do something awesome, come back refreshed and happy,
is probably the easiest thing to negotiate. So if you want to come back, I usually recommend if it's like one to three months is what people can typically negotiate off, partly because that's in the framework of typical leave of absence. You know, if someone has a heart attack, or if someone has a baby, or you know, most companies are somewhat equipped to handle a one to three month absence. Now, if you want to take a year off, two years off,
you might not be able to negotiate that. You might have to separate from the company, although I know a lot of people. Actually, one of my client siblings was kind of inspired. After my client made some progress and was a doctor and win and just quit, she was like, I need a year off. I'm out of here, like peace out, And they were like no, no, no, no, no no no, okay, how about you leave and then
in a year you just come back. Just please come back, whatever you do, just please come back whenever you're ready. And so sometimes you can kind of negotiate this understanding that a job is available when you return. But either way, I always encourage, even if you're going to separate, do an exit negotiation, which we can kind of get into
how to structure that. But yeah, shorter, if you can start with a shorter leave of absence, go for it one to three months, negotiate that you might need to separate. If it's a longer leave of absence, are.
You typically still getting paid? I guess depends on the length of time and what you negotiate. So if you're like gone for a month, are you able to say, listen, I'm going to come back and be rested, refresh, meet kicking butt. So you should probably pay me for this month off or is it like half and half? Like how do you negotiate sort of the pay for when you're going to be gone?
So I always encourage people, as like a rule of thumb, to look at what their leave of absence pay policy is currently so if people will get zero pay for vacation or maternity leave, you're probably not going to be able to negotiate a paid leave of absence, So you can start with an unpaid leave of absence. Some companies will do paid or sometimes so there's an HR logistics issue in the background and of your health insurance, your four one K contributions, your dental you know all of that.
Where does that money come from? So some companies like Bank of America offer twenty five percent pay, which essentially helps cover all of your automatic deductions.
That's cool to know.
There's some companies who just kind of have that structured into the way they do business with their employees. Okay, what about healthcare because this is one of those things. Do you if you quit altogether, you might not have healthcare at all we're talking about then your income drops.
So do you go on healthcare.
Dot gov and get a plan there? What's the best way to make sure that you have coverage, especially cat traffic coverage while you're on your break?
Yeah, absolutely have healthcare coverage. Like this is not the time to be like skip it. Definitely get healthcare coverage. There are in the US. You know, this is kind of a US problem. In the US, there's six or seven, eight kind of different routes you can go. Typically, if people are looking at a two, three, four month mini retirement, I generally suggest Cobra just because the ease of use. It might not be the cheapest option, but you get to keep all your same doctors, you get to stay
in the same network. You just it kind of rolls over seamlessly. If you're looking at a longer mini retirement, you know, eight months a year, then looking at the Exchange is a good option. But there's also other options. So sometimes if there's a married couple, one of them could stay employed while the other one, you know, does
their mini retirement and they swap back and forth. I had clients who one of the spouses had a very severe, expensive, ongoing medical condition, and they're like, we have to have insurance all the time, and so we just came up with a plan. We're like, you'll just you know, you'll swap back and forth, each of you getting some time. If you know, let's say both people want to take a year off, maybe one of them works part time. You know, like I said, I'm obsessed with gardening and plants.
If I was a distressful corporate job and wanted a year off and I could go to the local nursery and work part time and water plants, like that is my dream anyways.
All I want to do.
Is be outside and water plants and talk to people about plants.
Like, oh, I thought you're gonna say talk to plants both.
I talked to my plants as well. But that could be an option, you know, to where you have this flexus ability, You have the ability to do more trips and things, So there's some options you can kind of piece together, and people are always really nervous about it. I always encourage people to take an hour and do the research because it's usually those unknown pieces that create that hesitation and get people stuck. But see what's out there, and you don't have to decide forever. That's the other
great thing you'll love about Cobra. If you're overwhelmed, if you cannot figure out healthcare, start with Cobra. You don't have to stay on it the whole time. You can do it for two or three months and then decide, actually, I want to switch to the exchange now, or I want to work part time or kind of come up with a new option.
It makes me think back to when I worked in the corporate world for like a two years, and once my wife and I were looking to start our own business, Jillian, I had looked into what healthcare is going to cost, and what I realized was that even if I was going to stay with my company, I would have dropped the group insurance because it was actually more expensive because we were young and healthy than having gone out on
our own and paying for health care. This is a different, simpler time, I know, I know in the health care space, I mean, but what I love what you said there though as well about actually going and working at a nursery, Like that's a way that you can offset the cost of a mini retirement. And so let's talk about I guess budgeting for a mini retirement or a sabbatical and
what that entails. Because so by working at part time job, not only does that offset your health care cost, but you've got a little bit of money trickling in, and so that kind of helps to offset the missed income. But what about, like, how else can you financially prepare for sabbatical, Whether you're talking about on the income side of the equation, or even on the on the expenses side of the equation.
I think the planning stage isn't too complicated. You know. It starts with knowing your baseline budget how much does it cost you to live for a month, and then kind of itemizing what is the cost of this thing I want to do? And I have exercises I walk people through of like how to decide what the next mini retirement should be. But if all things you're equal, especially if you're early in your financial journey, and you have twenty different ideas, start with the least expensive one.
You know it will it'll help, It'll help you make really good financial progress. You don't have to start with you know, I want to do one hundred and twenty day around the world cruise. This might not be the one you do at thirty two, Like maybe save that to when you're eighty two. And the first one is like camping, you know, an American road trip or hiking
through Europe or something. So there's that part, and there's once you start to I encourage people like list out all of the elements of what the thing they want to do during their many retirement would cost and that way, you can kind of start to find creative ways to pay for that. So if there's flights, you know, maybe you do credit card points to help cover the flights, but lots of different things you can do the research to figure out how could I bring those costs down?
What are some alternatives you can crowdsource those ideas or even like enlist some help. You know, when it comes Christmas and birthday time, if you have like a backpack that you really want, or you know, a piece of luggagey you really want, or travel books or whatever that is, you know, put that put that on the wish list. So on the on the budget side, for money savvy people, that's usually not the biggest stress, but there are lots
of boys on the income side. To bring in some extra cash during your mini retirement, that could make it, you know, a little less stressful, because, like I said, if someone's used to earning and investing and saving, and if they've been in that mode for a long time, not earning bending down selling investments is a little stressful at first. It takes some practice. And so there are some things you know, when we travel, we travel about half the year in an RV around the country with
all of our kiddos. We rent out our house while we're gone. So we rent out our house for about twenty four hundred dollars. Our travel expenses are about the same, and so it costs us the same to live at home or to travel full time. So we don't actually really have many additional costs to traveling. And so that's a really if you want to travel, it's a really kind of low barrier to you know, to rent out your house. You don't have to necessarily have rentals. You
don't even have to do an airbnb. We do long term, but it could create a lot of income that could offset those additional costs.
Like I feel like kind of what you've referred to in the last few answers, just thinking outside the box. I think there can be roadblocks, right, like.
Oh, healthcare, how am I gonna How am I gonna do that? One?
I guess I'm just not gonna take a mini retirement, or uh yeah, what am I gonna do with the house? Who's going to take care of it? And like actually maybe you make money on it, like these are these.
Are ways gonna pay me to take care of my house for me? Right? Right?
And it's so easy, I think though, to let those things like the mortgage or the healthcare be these roadblocks to doing the thing that's going to be incredibly life giving, potentially beneficial to your future career, but more than anything beneficial to you as a human.
Yeah.
Absolutely, Yeah, Okay tell me this self employed folks, that's a little different.
Right.
So we were talking about breaking free from an employer, but if you run your own business, it can feel even harder to step away, I think, and if we but that's one of your tenants for a mini retirement is that you have to leave your day job. So can you can you like participate in it a little bit? Or is it like no, no, you got a cold turkey?
Do this thing?
Your business needs to be run by somebody else. You need to put on a pilot for a bit. How how do you.
Help self employed folks think through taking any retirement.
Yes, I think a lot of nine to five employees have this assumption of, oh my gosh, it would be so much easier if I was the boss, I would just say yes to me, And the reality is it's so much more complicated, it's so much harder, and it's scarier for a lot of people. While it can be scary for employees, like what if I don't get hired again, it has a different level of fear of what if the thing I've spent years building explodes while I'm gone
and I come home to like a pile of rubble. Yeah, Like that's a different level of fear, But there also is so many benefits. So to tackle your first question of do you have to walk away completely honestly for people's first mini retirement, I don't suggest it. I suggest shrinking your responsibilities to where you can accomplish them in maybe five, maybe ten hours a week, trying to get
closer to five. But the reality is, when you're building out better systems, when you're building out better processes, when you're hiring people, it's really tough to replace you one hundred percent. Like there's more risk and like ten times the effort to replace you one hundred percent versus replacing
you eighty percent. And so I always encourage people like, what's the eighty percent that you could automate or you could get off of your plate, or you could delegate to someone else, And what's the twenty percent that like is really essential that you do and just focus on that during your mini retirement. But yeah, it's they tend to be more successful and it's easier to get it prepared, and then you know retiring often. The more often people
do this, the better you'll get. It's kind of like people ask me, like, is it hard to rent out your house? Yes, it's super hard. The first time you have to declutter everything, you have to clean everything, you have to like pack stuff up. But every time you do it, you come back to a cleaner, more prepared, more organized home, and the next time it's less hard and it takes less time to prepare. And it's the
same thing for self employed. The more often you do it, the stronger and smoother and like more efficient your business becomes, the better trained your employees become. And it does get it does get easier. So you might get to like I've logged off, I've thrown away my cell phone. You will hear nothing from me for six weeks. But I recommend starting with like five hours.
A week check in not just like it is a big thing to do to take a mini retirement, but what's even bigger is taking an actual retirement. Now I love that, Like one of the recurring themes to what I hear you saying is that you're trying this out. It's not going to be perfect the first time, and the more you do it, the better you're going to get.
And I can't help but to think about the sort of the like you barely touched on the selling of assets, right, drawing down of principle, and that for so many retirees is an incredibly difficult thing.
What an awesome way to try that thing out?
By yes, and maybe you're not obviously you're not paying penalties and taxes on withdrawing money out of your retirement early, but even not contributing to those retirement accounts, it does this mental shift where it feels like you're not making progress because maybe you're measuring progress incorrectly, maybe you're going about it the wrong way. And I like that, whether you're talking about being self employed or even retirement accounts. Yeah, there's just a low risk to giving this a shot
at a reasonable level at least. But all throughout your answers and just kind of how you've talked about this, you're you've referred to your kids, and so we've got a few questions about whether or not many retirement is possible with kids. I mean, obviously it is because you've done it. But we'll get to that and more. Right after this.
We're back. We're still talking about retiring often. Why you you who are listening right now, You should probably retire regularly, more consistently. It's not all or nothing. It's not oh, can't wait till I'm sixty five. Maybe you should retire little bits here and there along the way. And it
certainly sounds like an ideal, ideal way to live. It's something Matt and I are discussing more and more as business partners and as friends, and so part of the reason we wanted to have Jillian on today was selfish in nature, because was it like for us maybe to do this more in our own lives. But Jillian first, before Matt and I take off for a couple months, we I have to know, like, what are the horror stories?
What are the worst possible outcomes of retiring often? Do you have any from your own experience or from some of the people that you talk to or work with like that have just been like, that's not for me.
I wouldn't say that it's not for them, but there can be legitimate challenges. There are things that are hard and go wrong, and I never I never sugarcoat that, Like I think it's really important to kind of know what you're getting into and to know what the challenges might be. But I also always encourage people like these are challenges, like this is a bridge you're gonna have to cross at some point. The only alternative to figuring
the stuff out is dying at your desk. See, you either die in your desk or you figure out some of these challenges. So we might as well start small, like you said, we might as well practice along the way in like bite sized challenges versus okay, now, and we're re tired for thirty years, like I have to take a thirty size bite. But yeah, there's a lot
of challenges, like like I mentioned briefly, unpacking baggage. A lot of couples, and this is true whether you're sixty five twenty five, A lot of couples have more conflict during retirement because they have to stare at the dirty kitchen all day long.
In each other.
Yes, well, I think that's what you call your husband.
Okay, But I always encourage people like this. While it can be viewed Sometimes people's internal story can be why the heck did I even take this time off? And why am I spending all this money? And why am I losing all this income just to like fight with
my spouse? And that could be the story, or you could say, you know what, this is the opportunity for us to really focus on this and learn some new skills and figure out our communication and work through this so that we can have decades more being happily married.
But that can catch people off guard. Another thing that catches people off guard is if they are severely burned out, they often under us to make the time and the intensity of what that recovery will look like, and it sneaks up on people where their body kind of downshifts, and it's almost like if you've been fasting and then you start eating again, your body all of a sudden feels super hungry, and you feel hungry for a really
long time. If you've been depriving yourself of rest and recovery, soon as your body realizes, oh, I have access to this, it will feel super tired, and it will feel super tired for a really long time. And there again, the story people tell themselves never the helpful story, but it often sounds like, well, maybe I'm just not motivated. Maybe I'm not a productive person. Maybe I'm just lazy. Maybe I can't thrive outside of my nine to five. This
was a horrible idea. I thought I was going to be able to accomplish all these things, and now I'm just napping. I have no motivation. I should just go back to work because this sucks when in reality, your body's just trying to get you back to your baseline and it sees this as the perfect opportunity. So if people kind of go in knowing this might be something that happens and can reframe it of oh my gosh, my body is really tired. Maybe I should shift my plans.
But I'm so grateful I have the ability to give my body what it needs.
Another downside I could see of many retirements doing them regularly is being away from community, from family, from you know, some of those the people that matter most to you, and over an extended period of time. So let's say I'm like taking four months off and I'm away from those people for a long time, Like that is a very grounding thing for me, and I would imagine for a lot of people out there, what does that look
like and what like? How have you dealt with being removed from your community for an extended period time as you're enjoying that time with your family, getting off the beaten path and not working nearly to the same degree, Like are you staying in touch with your community or are you writing letters? Like what is how do you how do you kind of maintain that cultivate that while you're away.
Yeah, well, there's there's two ways to look at this. One. I always encourage people you don't have to leave for a mini retirement, Like you can stay home one summer. I took the summer off and I planted a food forest in my backyard. You know, you can play in a band, you can do things locally. So if you don't want to leave your community, you don't have to. But the other side is if you want to travel.
It's actually been massively beneficial for us to be able to connect with extended family, to be able to connect with friends, friends from college, friends from you know, my husband was in the military, so we have friends all over the country during that season of our life. Professional friends. When people only have fourteen days of vacation between holidays and birthdays and weddings. There isn't a lot of time left to go visit your cousins or your great aunt
or your friends from college. You know, oftentimes we lose some of those connections, and we lose some of those relationships, and when you're traveling, it's a great opportunity. You know, we kind of try to plan our trip a little bit around where are all the people that we haven't
we haven't gotten to see for a while. And so while you know it is important to maintain your connections back home, there might be those more distant connections that you actually have the opportunity to kind of lean into if you are traveling.
I love that that makes sense to not you're not. It's not like you're replacing your community, but it's like, hey, how can we strengthen some of these other relationships that we have or maybe.
Relationships too that we've neglected over over the years. But uh, all right, last question, Jillian. Uh. I mentioned kids earlier.
Obviously I think a lot of I mean, the way I'm thinking about this, I'm like, all right, summer breaks, that's an easy mini retirement, right, You've got two or three months where you can take off. But if you're thinking beyond that, how does that work with schooling? I mean you're talking about taking months on end off.
What does that look like?
Are you homeschooling and then when you come back, are you, you know, are the kids like jumping right right back into public schooling? Is there any catching up that has to be done? What does that look like? Just from a practical standpoint with kids and education.
Yeah, for us, so we live in Montana, so the education piece will be a little bit state specific, but it is pretty easy to find online or talk to you know, your school's administration to see how they would handle different policies. Ours is if kids are gone for more than a month, they unenroll them. So when we leave because we like to travel in the winter because I get seasonal depression and Montana is like massively cloudy in the winter, so we travel in the winter, so
we unenroll them. We homeschool them when we travel, and then when we get back, we re enroll them and they jump back into school. We don't. Sometimes people ask us about our curriculum. It is totally haphazard. It is all over the place. But because kids are all of our kids are moving at their own pace. They tend
to massively outpace their peers when they return. So I kind of feel bad, Like we got back early April this year, so they're going back to school for two months, and I kind of feel bad sending them back because they're not going to learn a single thing in the next two months, not a lick of information. I'm just sending them back so they can like get back into the rhythm. See their friends have like build those you know,
community connections again. But yeah, I'm not in any way expecting them to learn new information these last two months because they're a greater or two level ahead at this point. But yeah, it's I would say, you know, kindergarten in Montana through junior high that's the system, and it's pretty easy. It gets a little bit more complicated in high school for a lot of reasons. You know. Oftentimes people are like, I don't know if I want to travel when my kids are young, and I get it. It's so much
more like physical labor. It's so much more emotional labor to travel with them. But with school and with friends and with activities and hobbies, it's logistically so much easier. When kids are younger. I have two in high school now, and it's tricky and we're having to shift plans and kind of shift gears to accommodate those those needs. So I always encourage people travel while your kids are young,
because you just never know. You never you never know what your kids will want or need once they get into junior high in high school.
That's good advice.
Jillian. Thank you so much for walking us through this. It's given me a lot of food for thought, especially that last point.
I'm like, Okay, I totally caught myself in that position of being like, well, the four year old can barely hike it a couple miles, Like I want to make you know, don't you want to go when you can throw down like five, six, seven miles because I'm thinking National parks. But then, like you said, yeah, are the oldest are they going to want to do that? So it's easy to I don't know, it off in the future for ourselves into the position of the questions that we're asking Jillian.
For sure, Jillian, thank you for joining us. Where can our listeners find out more about you? More about taking many retirements on.
The rig, Like you mentioned retireoften dot com and I have some worksheets there if you want to start kind of planning what that might look like, or are on social media. I'm at Gillian John's Rod.
That's right.
And we didn't even mention the workbook that you've got out. And you've got a book coming out next year about retiring often, so we'll make sure to link to that one. It's available into your current resources now, Jillian, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Thank you, guys, it's wonderful to be back.
Well, Joel, are you convinced is the time for us to just hang it up at least for like a month or two?
And I think so.
I think so, And I think like I told Jillian actually right after we got off the call, that we were considering something like a two week extended thing next June, once my wife's graduated getting her degree as a marriage and family therapist. And then now I'm like, why stop it two weeks?
Why not make it longer?
Why not just lean into that a little bit harder and make it a month and try our first like legit many retirement.
I think you and.
I we're solid about work life balance. We're solid about taking time off but this makes me want to do even more.
Definitely does.
The hardest part is going to be you getting her to take a many retirement when she's just getting started. Like that's the I feel like the difficult part there. But yeah, was that your big takeaway? Nor do you have something else that you want to refer to in our conversation than.
I think my big takeaway was when she said, if you have less time, you want more luxury, and I think it's so.
Freaking true luxury time continuum. If you have the rest of each other, guess what you want to have? Pay someone to clean your house, you want to pay someone to mow your lawn, you want to pay someone to deliver the groceries.
Everything costs more. When you feel like you're strapped for time, you're paying for you're outsourcing all these services.
If you only have four days in Paris to travel because that is the only block of window, or that is the only window of time that you could get away from work, well guess what you're gonna be paying off the nose to be able to take off during those four days, which happens to be when everybody else also wants to take time off and flights are ridiculously expensive, and the compounds, it's everything, like literally everything costs more.
Yeah, and so I think, just like what she said, if it's five thousand bucks for you to take a week vacation, it's not twenty thousand dollars to take a month long vacation. In fact, it might be somewhat similar in price because you're going to be doing all these all these different things with a unique approach. So yeah, think about think about that, how being constantly busy is costing you more. And if maybe you had more time in your life you can enjoy some of those tasks
and diy and save yourself some money. I think there's a lot of truth to that. Yeah, man, I couldn't agree more. So my big takeaway is going to be when she was talking about we were sort of talking about the nuts and bolts, like the practical side of planning for a sabbatical or a many retirement, and she basically highlighted that for most folks it's not too difficult to figure out the financials of it. And so what
does that then leave. It's the psychological, emotional, the emotional, the mental side of things, and like all the numbers part of the equation, like those are all now.
Just excuses because she said that.
How you can take one hour, do a little bit of digging around and figure out Oh, look, turns out my company already has the policy, it's already spelled out. Or you can spend that hour researching. Okay, well, what does it then look like for me to pay for cobra?
Oh?
What does it then look like for me to take this much time away? How is that going to impact my career? There is so much fear of the unknown, and it keeps us locked into the rut of going and punching the clock, you know, just doing the same things that we're so used to because we're proficient, we're competent, but also I think because we're scared.
Man.
I think it's it's difficult to.
Do something that that causes like a little feeling of fear that kind of like sparks up.
Inside of us.
I ever get a real job again. All there's all these questions that come up, and I agree, I think there are these kind of root level questions that are probably really good things for us to sort through, but it's hard to have the time to sort through them if we're you know, working our butts off exactly, and one other things she mentioned, you know, going to see
friends and family and stuff. I thought one of the perk of that is often there's a free place to stay when you're doing that, so that can dramatically, least for a couple of days, rekindle some of those Yeah yeah, yeah, they might boot you out, but you want to be here for how No, I'm on a many retirem I don't think you understand to be here for a couple of months and they're like sorry, but yeah, a few days in a bunch of different places can can make for like a really fun trip.
I think.
Yeah, all right, let's tell folks about the beer you and I enjoyed during this episode. Grits and Juice by Carolina. How do you say this barn House, boun bowen House, Yeah, something like that. Okay, is it like barn House? It's like, okay, I think's German? Maybe bower House.
Did you?
I guess you picked this beer up about a Greenville I've never even heard of them, surprising well, considering how much time I spent in Greenville, South Carolina, that.
I've only had a couple of beers from them, but this one was by far my favorite that I've had for this great, so good, super tasty, the most One of the most underrated beer styles is when you combine sour and hops together. This beer had both because it was it was a session I pa that had sour vibes going on, with like citrus sour going on, and it was delicious.
It's totally barrel aged too, right or no, I don't because it had like a funkiness going on like that made me think of that made me think of oak.
I don't know, but.
Yeah, no, it did have a funkiness, but I don't know that it was barely okay nice, I dug it.
The grits and juice. Is that like a Snoop Dogg reference gin and juice?
Maybe, I don't know, but a southern version.
It had a nice acidity to it with some of that funk while at the same time having some of this some of that hoppy bitterness on the finish as well. Super tasty and doubly fund Since I don't think I've ever had a beer by these guys, so I'm always fun to try a new brewery. Yeah, glad you were able to pick this one up for sure, me too nice? All right, We'll make sure to link to some Agillian's resources that we talked about here on the podcast. We'll make sure to link to her show as well as
her site. You can find that up in our show notes at howamoney dot com.
Stay tuned because will we be back on Friday with a Friday flight or will we be like kicking our feet up somewhere.
Who knows.
You'll find out in a couple of days, I guess, but Mattha's gonna do it for this one. Until next time. Best Friends Out, Best Friends Out,