Afford Anything - Mini-Retirements Are the New Early Retirement – with Mom of Six, Jillian Johnsrud

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

#600: Jillian Johnsrud was falling apart. After suffering a miscarriage, she couldn't pull herself together to return to her job as a youth pastor in DC. She decided to take a month off. That unexpected break became Jillian's first "mini-retirement" — a deliberate step away from work for at least 30 days to focus on something meaningful.  Today, Jillian is a mom of six who has taken more than a dozen mini-retirements with her kids, who currently range in age from 8 to 17.  During her first mini-retirement, she and her best friend piled into her green Honda Civic and drove from DC to Seattle, leaving her 13-year-old son Micah at home with her husband. A couple years later, Jillian took Micah, then 15, to Glacier National Park in Montana for another mini-retirement. They saw mountain goats, kayaked together, and swam in ice-cold waters.  This trip created irreplaceable memories. Sadly, Micah died six years later.  His death changed how Jillian sees time. She now understands that meaningful moments don't wait for perfect timing - they either happen now or vanish forever.  Waiting for "someday" might mean missing chances forever.  This drives her philosophy about mini retirements — life contains fleeting seasons that we either embrace now or miss entirely. "To be able to share those memories with him there is priceless," Jillian tells us. This understanding shapes her approach with her other children too. From a 10-week road trip to 10 national parks in a pop-up camper to a recent six-month journey across the eastern United States with her five younger children (now ages 8-17), Jillian prioritizes experiences that fit each season of family life. Planning your own mini retirement? Jillian recommends focusing on four key areas: managing your time (pick just 2-3 priorities), addressing career logistics (craft a compelling story for your employer), saving money (about 6.5 percent of your income for a month off every other year), and preparing for emotional revelations. Jillian emphasizes the importance of separating your mini retirement fund from long-term retirement savings. This separate fund, which she calls the "in-between bucket," allows you to spend freely on experiences now rather than postponing all enjoyment until traditional retirement age. As Jillian puts it: "You can't postpone every good thing in your life." Timestamps: Note: Timestamps will vary on individual listening devices based on dynamic advertising run times. The provided timestamps are approximate and may be several minutes off due to changing ad lengths. (0:00) Introduction to mini-retirements (0:59) Definition of mini-retirement: stepping away from work for 30+ days to focus on something meaningful (3:03) Jillian shares her first mini-retirement story after experiencing personal loss (8:28) Taking time off to enjoy important life moments before they pass (12:12) Jillian's trip to Glacier National Park with her son Micah before he passed away (20:33) Four components of planning a mini-retirement: time, career, finances, unexpected challenges (34:14) Time management: choosing 2-3 clear goals rather than trying to do everything (42:39) Career strategies: how to present your mini-retirement to employers (1:01:29) Financial planning: saving 6.5% of income for monthly breaks every other year (1:14:34) Handling unexpected challenges that arise during your time off (1:20:01) How mini-retirements reveal personal issues you've avoided through work (1:33:32) Jillian's recent family adventures with five children Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why wait until you have a few million in the bank before you take a mini-retirement? Today, we're going to talk to Jillian John's Rood, an expert in mini-retirements. She is a mom of six who has taken many mini-retirements of her own. She coaches people through the mini-retirement process. She hosts a podcast on mini-retirements called Retire Often. And she has a new book about mini-retirements coming out in September. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice carries a trade-off. And that applies not just to your money, but to your time, focus, energy, attention to any limited resource you need to manage. So, what matters most and how do you make choices accordingly? This show covers five pillars. Financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. I'm your host, Paula Pant. Welcome, Jillian. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being here on the show. Julian, what is a mini retirement?

There's three elements that you have to hit. The first is stepping away from your nine to five. The second for a month or longer is the time frame. 30 day minimum. 30 day minimum. And the third one is to focus on something that matters to you. Does a mini retirement necessitate leaving the location where you live? Oh, absolutely not. I think of mini retirements is kind of like a Swiss Army knife. It's one thing, but it has so many different functions and different ways that people, use it and utilize it. I think a lot of people think about slow travel, extended travel for

many retirements. One of the great functions of many retirements is that you can do things that don't fit into your nights and weekends. So for a lot of people, hiking the Camino, like learning Spanish and Costa Rica, like doing these long, more time intensive adventures is high on the priority list for sure. But I've done a lot of mini retirements where I stayed at home. I actually just this fall took a month off to learn tango. And I did a deep dive in like a tango intensive. And sometimes I think about my 80 year old self, like what would she like and what would she appreciate? And I thought, oh my gosh, if I just take a month and I invest this time, I only spent $1,000, spent like 40, 50 hours learning tango. She's going to be so happy that like she had a

life full of dancing and fun. I met this guy at dance who was probably about 80, 85. And I think for most people at that season in their life, they're less active. They have less mobility. They have less community, less activities. And he's like the most popular guy on the dance floor. He knows all the dances. His dance card is always full. He knows all of the people. Everyone loves him. He has all of this great community. And I thought, for a month and a thousand, $1,000, like, when an amazing investment for my future self. Speaking of $1,000, when a person takes a mini-retirement, generally speaking, and of course, each experience is unique, are these typically unpaid?

It depends on your employer. I always encourage people, if you're asking for, like, a month off and your employer has a paid leave policy, and so they pay out leave for a number of different reasons, I would start there. But if, you know, you're asking for three months off, that will probably be unpaid. Usually longer than three months off, you have to consider separating from your employer. If you want six months or a year, partly that's an HR issue. There's like some technical stuff behind the background. But I've also had people that separated from their employer with the understanding, like as soon as you're ready to come back. Like as soon as you're done with whatever this

adventure, please come back. We would be very excited to hire you again. which can ease some of that job anxiety, knowing that we have a great career to come back to. Right. Let's have some questions about the technicality and the logistics of how this will all get set up. And we're going to talk about that in just a moment. But before we do, I want this community to get a better understanding of you and your own experience with this. So you're a mom of six. How old were you and how old were your kids the first time that you took a mini-retirement?

Tell us about that very first one. The very first one. So one of the tools I encourage people to do, I call it a mini-retirement go-bag. Because I used to watch a lot of NCIS. So in the show, they have like a little duffel bag that has like a couple changes of clothes and their passport and some cash. So if something unexpected happens, they just grab the bag from behind their desk and run to the airport. And so I encourage people to pack a mini-retirement go bag. And they have a couple plans.

Like, what would you do for a month? Figure out the logistics of that. save the money, because sometimes life will present you with an opportunity that you don't expect. Maybe you get laid off unexpectedly. Maybe there's a death in your family. Maybe something bad happens. And all of a sudden, you could have a month off. You could have three months off.

But it can be tough to mentally and emotionally pivot from like, I just got laid off to, I'm going to go do a cool adventure. And if you've already done like the emotional and logistical planning, that pivot is much quicker and easy. year. My very first one, I had known for years that I wanted to do this and I had had some plans and I had saved some money. The first one was actually one of those unplanned ones in that it was a moment of like grief. I had unexpectedly had a miscarriage. And for a lot of people, a miscarriage is like a little blip. Like a little blip in their journey to becoming a parent. And they're like, oh, I'm sad. And then they go back to work and life is normal. was not doing well. I was not doing well at all. It was a lifetime of repressing every trauma. It just

kind of got unlocked and flooded out. And I could not pull my crap together. And so my employer was like, yeah, honey, you just need to, you need to take a month. Just go figure your stuff out and then come back. And I said, yeah, thank you. Perfect. So me and my best friend, she had just come back from living overseas, got in my Green Honda Civic, and we drove D.C. to Seattle and back over a month. And we slept on friends' couches, and we went to national parks, and we stayed in tents, and we slept on the frozen ground, and we ate a lot of microwave popcorn and no vegetables. And it was so amazing. It was so therapeutic. It was so fun. And just kind of righted everything in my life. I've done a dozen mini retirements, but it's one of my favorite because now I look back and I'm like,

under no circumstance am I doing that again? Life is different, but like, I don't sleep on the frozen ground anymore. I don't sleep intense anymore. I require vegetables now. Life is different. And I'm so happy that I leaned into that season of my life and had such an amazing experience knowing that there are seasons in life with expiration dates. They will not hold for 20 or 30 years. Like you can do this now and you can appreciate and you can lean in and have this amazing experience or it will pass you by. And sometimes we know that there's expiration dates, you know, when my kids were little and they were itsy-bitsy and they just wanted to be with me 24-7. I was like, oh, this is a moment.

we did 10 weeks to 10 national parks in a pop-up camper. And I remember getting to the end of that trip and thinking, I couldn't do this in 20 years. We do this now, but there's no way like a bunch of 20-year-olds are going to load into a pop-up camper with me for 10 weeks to go to 10 national parks. Like, we enjoy this now or that season is gone and it won't ever come back. So many retirements give us that opportunity to lean into those small. seasons of our life because they're not going to wait till we're 65. You can't postpone every good thing in your life. So that first mini retirement, if I'm understanding it correctly, was before you had any kids? I had one, our oldest adopted kiddo. So he stayed home with my husband.

And me and my friend took off for the month. How old was he at the time? He would have been, we adopted him when he was 11. He probably would have been probably 13. Yeah. Tell me about the experience of, A, just bringing up to your husband like, hey, will you watch our 13-year-old by yourself for a month while I go do this thing? That, I think, for anyone would be a big ask. And then the experience for him in terms of, hey, mom's going to be gone for a month. And then for you, like, that's probably the first time that you were separated for such a long period of time. walk us through that. Yeah, I guess I feel lucky in that I'm married like a grown-ass man. It was like a capable human being. To his credit, that was never a challenge in that if there was something that either of us needed for our well-being, for our emotional, mental health, for our career, both of us did whatever we needed to do to support the other person in that. And that was definitely a pattern throughout our marriage in a lot of different aspects. And it can be,

I think it's a little bit harder sometimes for the person receiving than sometimes the partner giving. If we have the ability to give this gift to our partner, whether we're staying at our job and they're taking time off, you know, a lot of people, especially if they have partners, they stagger their many retirements. They don't necessarily do them at the same time, which makes the logistics a lot easier. One person still has income and health care and benefits, and the other one gets to enjoy that month off or six months or a year off. There can be a little couple complications of a little bit of jealousy

that pops up in couples that I see. And that trip was, oh my gosh, I think we spent like $1,700. It was so cheap. Like I said, there was a lot of microwave popcorn. So it wasn't like a huge financial commitment either. Fortunately, my work gave it to me off paid. Oh, wonderful. What were you doing at the time?

What was your career? I was a youth pastor. Oh. Wow. Did you work for a church? Yeah, a multi-ethnic church. So we had like eight different congregations of all different nationalities. My job was real interesting.

Wow. Did your 13-year-old understand what you were doing and why you were doing it? Did he understand that you were grieving a miscarriage and that you were. this was important for your emotional health? Yeah, I wasn't real good at hiding it. It was kind of a mess. So it was, it was very apparent to everyone like, oh yeah, she needs to figure this stuff out. And I actually, like I had another season of my life where I needed help and support in my mental health when I was maybe 27, 28. And it's incredible. I have grown to appreciate being open on the outside with what's happening on the inside because I think sometimes there's that temptation.

I'm just going to pretend everything's okay. I'm going to pretend everything's perfect. And that creates a barrier for us actually accessing help and support and the encouragement that we need from our community and from our family. You said you've done a dozen many retirements. Tell me about the first one that you did with some of your kids in tow. How many were there at the time and how old were they and where did you go and what? did you do, like paint a picture of the experience of a mini retirement with children? Yeah, we've done a lot of them. So the very first one was actually maybe a year or two later. I had left that job as a youth pastor. And they're kind of one of those mini retirement go-bag ones.

This wasn't something I had planned out for six months or a year. I had the idea. I really wanted to take our oldest adopted son back to Montana. We were in D.C. at the time where I grew up, I spent every summer in Glacier National Park. It's my favorite place in the world. It's the place I just feel the most like myself. And he had never experienced that. And I really wanted him to. And it was like the perfect time of year to go.

But many retirements were a hassle. Like they just are. It's logistics and it's inconvenient. And you have like all of this emotional baggage of like, should I be staying here? Should I be applying for jobs? Wait if someone wants to interview me. And I'm on this big vacation. Like now we have half the income.

Like is now the right time to be spending money. I appreciate this one because it was the one I probably struggled with the most emotionally. Feeling bad taking this really expensive vacation right after becoming unemployed. But we did the thing. I had the plan. We had the money set aside. And it was one of our best family vacations. We drove to going to the Sun Road.

We saw the mountain goats. We kayaked on Lake McDonald. We biked through Apgar. We did all the fun things. And it was like everything that I wanted him to experience. And again, with those seasons of life with expiration dates, you know, we ended up moving back to Callispell right outside Glacier. We, six years later. And it would be easy to say, well, now you have like 100 opportunities to take Micah into Glacier.

Because now you live right there. And while you're through all of that hassle when now you could just do it every holiday when he comes to visit. But two months after we moved there, he passed away unexpectedly. And he never got to see it again. I never got to bring him in until I took his ashes into the park. You know, many retirements are such a hassle. There's such a pain in the butt. And there's absolutely nothing about that that I regret.

It is my favorite vacation memory with him. And to be able to share those memories with him there is priceless. And so some seasons with expiration dates, you know, you know your parents are getting older. You know your knees are getting older. You know your kids are getting older and things will change and you'll change. And then sometimes life is unexpected and it's hard. And people get sick or people pass away or financial situations change. Marriage is change.

And being able to appreciate those things while we have the chance. His name is Mike. Micah. Micah, he was 15 when you did that trip, yes? Yep, he would have been about 15, yeah. And was it, you didn't have any other children at that time, so it was just the three of you? Yep, yeah. As a 15-year-old, because it's hard to be a 15-year-old on a trip with your parents.

Remembering back to when I was 15, you love these things that you're doing with your parents, but you also, that's an age where you also really want to be with your friends, but you're also seeing these new things that you've never seen. It's 15 is such a tender and in many ways very confusing age. It was such a fun trip because our national parks by and large are wild and dangerous and fun and 15 year old boys are kind of the same. So they just, they pair up nicely. So the water and glacier, this was August, it's always cold because the glaciers melt and they make the river. The water has been snow or ice two days prior.

So it's very cold. We would go down by the river. I would throw a coin in. And I would say for every coin that he jumped all the way to the bottom and grabbed up like I would pay him a dollar. And we just did that all afternoon because the water's like 35 degrees. So you jump in and like it knocks the breath out of you. Like it's so ridiculously cold. Stuff like that with kids is awesome.

We've done so many trips with our kiddos. so many museums and national parks and beaches. I grew in a really small town in Montana. We didn't have a ton of money. We never left. We never left the state. We never went anywhere. There was nothing to do.

It was like wheat and cattle everywhere we looked. And honestly, one of the best parts of being a mom is you kind of get a do-over of your childhood. Now we go all the places I never went. And while I'm kind of not a kid anymore, to indeed. joy that through their joy as kids, like going to Disney and theme parks and the ocean and like hiking through Zion. Yeah, you just get to do all of it again. And I think especially, you know, I loved traveling solo and as an adult. And traveling with kids is so different. But there again, it's that short season of life where everything is hilarious to them and

entertaining and being in Rome and having your toddler chase the flock of pigeons off over and over and over. You're like, I didn't know I appreciated this. I've seen too many churches, but this is fun too. What happened next? How old was Micah when your second child was born? Oh, it was shortly after our glacier trip, probably about 15. And what was your next mini retirement after that? There were a couple in there. We moved to Europe. My husband was stationed over there for four years. So he was what branch of the military? In the army. He was in the army? Yeah. And then when we moved back, one of the ones my husband actually did. So he had separated from the military, he had been medically retired. So we had been saving cash to buy a house up to 2008. And we assumed he would get out. And then he re-enlisted. And so we had all of this cash that we'd saved to buy a house. as the housing market was crashing and as the stock market was crashing. And so we pushed all of that money into the stock market and watched it rapidly decline,

which kind of made me want to throw up every day. Not going to lie, it was really painful. But thankfully, we were close to the bottom. You never know when you're close to the bottom. It's just awful. And you're like, the world is ending. But for the four years that we were overseas, it grew pretty well. And we came back in 2012.

in a really opportune moment in the housing market because a lot of investors had run out of money by then. Like they had been on a shopping spree the last four years. So there were a lot of fixer uppers that weren't moving as competitively as they were in maybe 2009. So we bought our very first house and we were able to pay cash for it. But man, it was a fixer upper. Like we just bought the ugliest thing we could find because it was such a deal. He actually took six months off and it fixed up that house. And then because we had, because we bought such an ugly house, we had enough cash left over for a down payment on our first rental property.

And there's, there's no way we could have done that if we were both working full time. When we had one little, our biological kiddo was like four years old at the time. I look at that many retirement. And like I said in the definition, it's stepping away from your nine to five. but oftentimes people do stuff on their many retirements other than just vacation. You know, if you wanted to start investing in real estate or if you wanted to start a business, like buying yourself that runway of, I'm going to give myself this many months to make a go of it and to really get something started that could financially benefit you long term.

And now I look at those houses and issue between the two of them, you know, they've appreciated half a million and the amount of money he would have made in six months, not substantial. And that's an excellent point because when we think of major retirements, when we think of eternal retirement, not the mini kind, but the kind that is a new phase of life, the inflection point retirement, we often, particularly for people who retire early, see that associates with some type of either career change or new project, you know, because if you retire at the age of 55, you still have so much youth, so much energy that you don't necessarily want to sit on the beach and do nothing.

Yeah. That might be fun for a month or a few months. But often those major retirements correlate with, all right, I've started. this business or I've started investing in homes or I've started a band, you know, whatever, you know, whatever that is. So it makes sense. I'm glad you brought that up that many retirements would do the same. And it's really helpful for a lot of people, especially for career pivot. It is very difficult when you're extremely burned out and overwhelmed in your career to imagine what a whole new career could look like for you. With burnout, it just, it reduces your creativity. It reduces your

bandwidth. You can't envision something else when you're in the thick of it. And for most people, the only way to really reimagine what the second chapter career could look like is to take a break and recover from burnout and get back to their baseline to where they can actually look around and go, okay, what else? What else is out there? And I see it a lot for a lot of people on the financial independence path. And I call it your first chapter career that's really optimized for earning and being able to invest and grow your net worth and pay down debt. And then you get to a point where you're like, maybe that's not my entire focus. Maybe that's not my entire goal. Maybe there's other things in my life I want to optimize for. I might not be done working, but I would like to

optimize for my health or my marriage or my hobbies or doing some other things. And I might not be done working. instead of just earning as absolute most as possible to save as most as possible. And so having, giving yourself kind of that gift to think about, okay, if I'm going to work for another 10 or 20 years, is there something I would like to do? Is there something that now that I'm 35 or 40 or 45, like I know myself a little better? I know what I like. I know what I'm good at. Maybe there's something that's a better fit.

In the people that you work with who take many retirements, is there a pattern that you see where the first few weeks or the first month is decompression, and then that is later followed by an acceleration of energy into something new? So it goes either way. It can go the two opposites. There is either a strong downshift, especially if people have been burned out for quite a while. The function of burnout is to get you out of a bad situation. Americans don't use it that way. They use it to how long can I stay and suffer in this bad situation? So by the time they finally get out of that, they're just crispy. And it's, Bernad's a little bit like fasting. And if you stop eating, you don't actually obsess about food all the time. You don't feel super hungry all the time to

where it's massively distracting because the function of it is to make sure you have enough energy and focus to go find food, not to not eat forever, but so you could go get some food eventually. Same with being tired or burned out. You have enough energy and motivation to get you out of that bad situation. Like if you're in a war zone, your body's like, this is hard, but we got to keep going. I need to get you out of here. But like when you stop fasting, once your body realizes, oh, we have access to food, it's back, you will feel very hungry. And you will continue to feel hungry until your body is caught up. And it's a little bit like when we're really burned out and then our body's like, oh, wait, we have access to rest. Now we feel very tired.

And we will continue to feel tired until we're caught up. And this can be massively discouraging for people because they have this internal narrative of what it means to rest, what it means to nap. And maybe they thought, oh my gosh, I've been working 60 hours a week. I'm going to take this mini retirement. I'm having all this time. I'm going to do all these things. I'm going to accomplish all these goals.

And their body's like, oh, thank God, we get a nap. Oh, my gosh. We've been waiting so long for this. And they feel tired. And they have no energy. And they have no motivation. It's their body's way of trying to get them to rest and to take advantage of this rest. But I've definitely had clients who are like, that story becomes not, well, I'm really tired.

It's a good thing my schedule is flexible. Good thing I can get caught up on some rest. The story becomes maybe I'm lazy. Maybe I'm not motivated. Maybe I don't have the discipline to function outside of a job. Maybe the only way I can be productive is if someone else is dictating my time. Maybe I should just go back to work because I'm clearly not getting any of the things done that I said I would. get done without realizing if you give yourself some time you'll recover and then raise up to what

I call kind of that new normal and depending how long people have been burned out that can take a month that can take two years it's not always a quick process the inverse of that is sometimes people are like running so high on adrenaline and cortisol and like stress hormones that they just take all of that energy directly into their mini retirement. And they plan, you know, four intense weeks of travel across Europe and then they start remodeling like their basement and they start this project. And over time that those productive hours in a day start to decrease. They go from maybe they were doing 12 hours during their job. And now they're doing eight And then they're doing seven and six and five.

And both sets of people usually end up in the same place. But if you know that that's probably the pattern, you can tell yourself more useful stories of like, I was doing 12 productive hours a day. And now I like to drink coffee for an extra half hour every morning and read the paper. And this is okay too. There's a technique I call unrushing, learning how to do our normal activity. in a very relaxed, calm, restful way, because when people are really overwhelmed and overworked, you survive by rushing through everything,

rushing through shopping, rushing through cooking, rushing through eating, rushing through cleaning up dinner, rushing through getting the kids ready for bed. And like, the only way you can fit it all in is to rush all of it. And all of it feels tiring. And it takes some time to learn, like, oh, wait, I can do this slowly. Actually, I can relax.

I can take a breath while I'm getting ready for work in the morning. Like, I don't have to live in this frantic energy all the time. I know someone. She has driver energy. You know, she is an executive of a major nonprofit. A lot of people report to her, and she's very much a driver, and she's very much in charge, and she is so chill. Her energy is just so chill.

But she gets so much done. And in watching her work, that was when I realized that those two are not mutually exclusive. That you can really bring that slow, chill energy to a massively productive day. Yeah. I'm sure it took her decades to. practice and hone that skill because it is a skill. The holidays are right around the corner and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get prepared.

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That's your commercial payments of fifth third better. I have more questions about your story and we'll get back to those at the end of this conference. But since we have now shifted to talking about how many retirements apply in the lives of others, let's cover the four major components of a mini retirement that a person should think through. Because I know you have a four-step framework in which a person thinks about mini-retirements in the context of, A, how they're going to spend that time, B, how they're going to manage their career, C, how they're going to manage their finances, and then D, how they're going to plan for the unplanned. So I'd like to spend this middle section of the episode covering those four components.

And then at the end, I've got, I want to hear more stories. More stories from the kiddos. Let's start with how a person should think about the management of their time. Yeah, there's a huge temptation to over-schedule and to be a little too ambitious. Right. And because there's so much of life, we have to get constantly. caught up on. For a lot of people, they've maybe worked years or 10 or 15 years consecutively. They haven't had a break for so long. And it's really easy to be like, okay, there's 150 things I want to

accomplish during this mini retirement. But factoring in, you might be a little burned out. So you might have less motivation. You might have less energy. You might need more rest. So I've really encouraged people to start by picking three. Three big focuses. for your time off and optimizing all of your day, all of your schedule to hit those intentions and to not try to do all three at the same moment in the same day, in the same week even. But to think about it, like we're going to have three phases of our mini retirement. And even if your mini retirement is only a week, each phase gets to be 10 days and then you can shift to the next phase because sometimes it's a little bit.

like a recipe. There are some ingredients that go really well together and there's some that don't and you just probably shouldn't put them in the same dish. Same with a mini retirement. I sometimes I have people say like, well, I really want to do like really like long extended travel and I want to start a business and I'm really burned out so I want to rest. I'm like, so those three things don't really go great together. Maybe we could do those one. a time, if we separate them, you could rest first and then you could travel and then you could start a business. But for a lot of people, between school and college and our career, other people have organized our time for us, most of our lives. And we don't have a lot of

practice at it. And other people have said, okay, this is what's important. This is what success looks like, here's how you know if you've done a good job at the end of the day. Here's the metrics to measure that by. But we haven't done that for ourselves very often. And so people often feel really confused or guilty. They wake up and they're like, what am I supposed to be doing? I'm supposed to be resting. I'm supposed to be doing hobbies.

I'm supposed to be working on this business. I'm supposed to be having quality time with my kids. And everything that they choose they feel is the wrong thing. Like, should I be reading right now or should I be finishing that house remodel project? Right. Should I be working on the house remodel project or should I be spending time with my mom? Because I really wanted to spend time with my mom too. And it gets to be hard to like settle in to I'm doing exactly what I need to be doing right now.

And so the first step is kind of picking what are those three big intentions and how do we optimize everything else to support those? What order do they go in? knowing when, especially if you have a longer remaining retirement, if you're going to be like your career breaks a year long, how do you know when you're ready to shift to the next phase? I'm kind of creating some little mile markers or benchmarks that say, okay, I think I did this. I think I feel good about this. I think I'm ready to move on to that next intention. It also really helps with sitting boundaries with other people. Something I do cover a little bit in. That for when you're working a job, your job is very good at setting boundaries for you. If your best friend says, hey, shoot, my kid is sick today. Could you come over and watch my kiddo?

And you're like, no, I have to go to work. Sorry. Your friend's like, hey, I'm building a deck this week. Are you available? And you're like, nope, I got to go to work. But when you're on a mini retirement, everyone around you will know that you're available. And if you haven't been able to clearly communicate, here is the intention for my time. Here's what I'm focusing on.

Here's what I'm optimizing for. They might not understand that all of those requests of your time and energy and attention are actually taking away from that goal. And it's one of the reasons that sometimes people feel lacklustre about their mini-retirements is they plan too much. They had like 150 goals. And they made like half an inch of progress on all of them. And everyone else laid claim on their time and attention and energy. You know, you're on many retirements. Your mom's like, hey, so instead of coming to Thanksgiving for like three days,

you could come for like 10 days, not knowing that you're actually also trying to start a business during this time. And that's not going to be useful for that goal. So just being really clear about what you want that time to. look like, I even have people create kind of a mock schedule for their day and for their week. How do you know if you're on track? One of the tools to use is doing like a weekly check-in and ask yourself the same five or six questions of, did I hit this intention? Am I making progress? Do I feel good about the amount of time I'm spending on each of these activities? Because they'll go off track. You'll have an amazing plan. And then once you get into it,

Let it'll go awry, and every week you need to kind of course correct and get your mini retirement back on track. The challenge that you described in which people around you conflate flexibility for availability, I know is also a challenge that many self-employed people face. Yep. Because people will say, oh, well, you make your own hours. Clearly, you can help me build this deck. It's a little extra challenging in that, at least with self-employed, hopefully people know you, are still working. Right. There is work to be done eventually.

Sometimes with those mini retirement intentions, if the first intention for your first phase is recover from burnout, it can be really tough to respect the fact that, like, on my agenda today is go for a walk and read a book and take a bath and go to yoga and take a nap and have lunch with a friend. That is my plan for the day. Like, I encourage people, especially if they're recovering from burnout, to come up with a list of active rest activities. What are activities that you do that are incredibly restful for you? Because most people are awful at resting.

And so if you're just like, sit on the couch for eight hours, it will actually create more anxiety for them than true rest. So how do you fill your day with usually five to seven really restful activities that? But at the end of the day, you're like, check, check, check. I did all seven. I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. And I feel really good. It also helps hold that boundary a little bit with people around you. But honestly, nobody respects an app.

Like, apps get no respect. Just because that's on your calendar is not going to be a great way to be able to say no. Right. And if you sit on the couch for eight hours, oftentimes that turns into mindless scrolling. It turns into Instagram, TikTok, social media, binge watching Netflix, and those can often have the opposite of the intended effect. In limited doses might be restful,

but when it becomes excessive, it also leads to greater unhappiness. We've covered how to think about your time during a mini-retirement. shifting gears to that the second of the four major components. Let's talk about how to manage the career aspect because I've heard from a lot of people who say, look, my job is not going to give me more than two weeks off continuously at the most. And the only way that I would possibly be able to do this would be by quitting my job. And that brings up a whole host of worries, concerns objections. Yeah, it's amusing to me because I get to hear every objection to many

retirements, but I also see how it actually works behind the scenes. So oftentimes people have two, like two extremes of their objection. One, my job is too important. I'm absolutely essential. There's no way they can live without me. No one else does what I do. So I can never have time off. or the other side is, well, my job's not important at all, and I don't make any money. So I'm either too poor or I'm too important. And the reality is both kinds of people take many retirements. I was at an event and someone, one of the C-suite executives, was like, there's no way I can get a month off. I'm too essential.

And no one even knows what I do. No one else could replace me. And I said, okay, if you quit. how long does it take to fill your position? And he goes, oh, shoot, well, that's, I mean, that probably takes six months. And I'm like, yeah, how long does it take for this person to get up to speed to where they can perform as well as you do? He's like, yeah, that's probably another six months. And I'm like, mm-hmm.

So HR could either give you a month off or they could lose 12 months, hopefully to find someone who's as good as you, but probably isn't. And at the end of the day, most companies just do what's easier and cheaper and simpler. And so as an employee, your job is to do the logistical work, the mental work, the emotional work of how do I make my mini retirement the easiest, simplest, cheapest option for my employer. Now, this is not something that you can dump in their lap and say this is your problem because it's not their problem. If you're going to make it their problem, they'll just say no. But if you say, I really understand my job role. I understand what things I can take care of ahead of time. I understand who else can fulfill these roles.

You put together the effort and then you come in a way that's very creative and collaborative. Here's the thing I want to do. I know this is going to take a couple meetings. You can't rush it. It takes time. But I have some ideas. I've thought this through. I think that we can figure this out.

And when the alternative is like the total pain in the butt of replacing you, it might just be easier to give you the time off, especially if your company has a leave policy. Other people have taken leave. Other people might need to take leave because they have a baby or they have a heart attack or stuff happens. And so there typically are the mechanisms available for how we can do this from an HR standpoint. standpoint. I had one person that I interviewed on my podcast who wanted a month off to hike the Camino. She was single. She never had kids. And she was like, listen, I'm not having babies. This is my baby. Everyone else gets maternity leave. I just want a month off to go do this cool adventure. And then I'm going to come back. And you know what? I'm going to be rested when I come back. I am not coming back sleep deprived. So I would like a month off. And I've never had any kids. So please give that

to me. And they were like, absolutely. So I think, especially for a month, three months off, I would at least have the conversation because I've had so many people that are like, you don't understand my company, you don't understand the HR, like nobody gets time off. And with a little bit, don't go in cold, but a little bit of preparation, they get a much warmer response of like, okay, let me think about this. We're going to have to have a few more conversations, but I think there's a way that we can make this happen. You said a little bit of preparation. What should a person do to prepare? The first thing is you need to craft your mini retirement story. How are you going to explain this? And I think about it like memoir rules. The rules of writing a memoir is all of it has to be true.

And it can't be the whole truth. Because the truth is too big. If we write a memoir of our lives, You could fill 100,000 words and it is not all of the truth. And if you try to give all of the detail, sometimes you lose the plot. Like you lose the story along the line. So crafting a very neat and succinct mini retirement story. I like people to focus on a couple elements of that. Like it should be positive. Make it an upbeat thing.

Make it interesting. ideally make it a one-time experience and something specific. So like a really bad mini retirement story would be like, gosh, I'm just really feeling burned out. I don't even know if I want to be here anymore. I'm feeling disenchanted with my life. I think I just need to like travel or something. I need to go find myself. Can I have a month off?

No. Right. But if you say, you know, the last few years have been really busy. We've had these big projects, and I'm so proud of what we did. But my mom for retirement always said she wanted to bike through Croatia with my dad, but my dad's passed away. She's retiring next month. I have two weeks vacation.

I would need four more weeks. But for me and her, to be able to bike through this, I would love to be able to give this gift to my mom. Gosh, like that's kind of cool and compelling. And it really endears people to be. like, let's try to figure that out. Like, yes, that sounds great. Let's see what we can do. So appeal to the humanity of HR. You know, I think we forget, and it's the same when people are like, well, how am I going to explain this when I'm, that I took a six-month or a 12-month career break

when I'm getting interviewed for jobs, like, won't I look lazy or inconsistent or flaky? And I'm just like, craft a really good mini-retirement story. Get these elements because the person that you're sitting next to and you're like, I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail or I went to Italy for three months and I studied art and I learned how to make pasta. There are also people that have the same wants and desires and interests. They want to spend time with people they love and they want to do cool things. While you could tell yourself the story of like, well, what if I don't look dedicated? The reality is planning and executing a mini retirement for something you want, it takes a lot

of logistics and planning and courage and vision and confidence to pull that off. So just tell a good story about it. Tell the right story. And if you're in kind of a work hard, play hard industry, lean into whatever those industry specific concerns are and say, you know what? I love this work hard play hard culture. So instead of mixing my personal life, all in with my job and trying to do work life balance. I hate work life balance. I want to be all in on work. So I take three months and I went

all in on my personal life and I did my hobbies and I saw the people I love. And now I'm ready to dive into this. And so tell the story that it's true. It's all true. But it's also the one that creates a compelling case. Right. And in that regard, it's like interval training, right? Periods of intense work, alternated with periods of intense rest. Yeah. In the book, I described this idea of professionally a half-time in sports. You know, growing up I played basketball. And no one ever says, well, the halftime is for the lazy players. Right.

The halftime is for the uncommitted players, really, who don't care about the game. The halftime's like an essential part of the game. It's when you rest and recuperate, but it's also when you refocus and reimagine what can happen in that second half of the game. And the best players utilize that fully for the ability to come out strong because they want to win, because they care about winning, because they're so invested in the sport. No one says, I'm going to skip the halftime. Yeah, right. Because it doesn't make sense. And in our profession, utilizing those halftimes and those breaks, if you care about your career, if you want to be.

the best. I used to do commission sales. Commission sales is a little bit like running track in that 20 percent, if you're 20 percent better, it doesn't mean you win 20 percent more races. If you're 20 percent faster than everyone else, you win all the races. And if you're 20 percent better at sales, you win all the sales. And sometimes those small competitive advantages make a massive impact. You know, when we would have people going through a divorce or having something in their personal life, you couldn't perceive it in their interactions with customers. When you saw their sales numbers, you could be like, oh, stuff is going on in your personal life because these numbers are bad. And when people had good stuff going on in their personal life,

there again, you couldn't quite see it in the interactions. They saw it in the numbers. So sometimes these breaks are for the people who care the most, for the people who are the most committed to their careers and their professions, because that competitive advantage is exponential. You said there were two categories of objections. There's the I'm too important category. I'm too essential at work. But then there's also the I'm too unimportant. I'm at the bottom of the totem pole. I don't make enough.

I don't have enough clout. I don't have enough sway at the company. I'm disposable. So I've done a lot of normal jobs. They're at my career. I've worked in a lot of different companies, corporate companies, mom and pop places. There are advantages of being an hourly worker. Finding, getting time off, so much easier. So much easier. Finding your next job. So much easier.

No one thinks about your career breaks. No one's like, oh, wait, there's a three-month gap in your resume here. No one cares. I was like a med spa. And the receptionist, she was probably 22, 24. And she was just like bubbling, like so excited. And she's talking to every single person that walks in. And so I'm trying to spy on these conversations.

And eventually I suss out that she has just taken her first airplane ride. Oh. Out of the state of Montana. Wow. First airplane ride ever. This woman took a mini retirement. She took a month off of her job. She probably makes $12 an hour.

She took a month off of her job. And for her very first trip out of state, she went to Peru. Wow. And she was like, and I didn't just go to the cities. I went to the deepest, darkest parts of the jungle in Peru. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is like a quest for Paddington Bear. Like, I don't even know what's happening here. So you just saved money and got a plane ticket.

And when the first time leaving the state of Montana, first time on an airplane, went to Peru for a month. And she was beside herself with joy. Now, I'm sure this wasn't a massively expensive trip. And maybe she had to like babysit on the weekends for a few months to pay for it. But that's, those are the kind of experiences with a mini retirement when she's 40, when she's 60, when she's 80, she might not remember a lot about being 22, but she'll remember that trip. Like it just becomes, it becomes life changing because how do you come back from that the same person? Right. What that makes me think of are the trips that I took when I was a call.

student, right, where I was an hourly worker, you know, I was picking up, I worked the overnight shift at the front desk of the dorms. And, you know, I would pick up these extra shifts in order to, I think I made like $7 and something cents per hour in 2005. This was like 20 years ago. I would take that money as an hourly worker and I would go on a three-week trip to two specific places. one was the Czech Republic and one was Costa Rica. Those aren't hypothetical examples. Those are both real life examples. But it got weirdly harder when I graduated from college.

I got my first job. I was an entry-level reporter at a newspaper. I earned a full-time salary of $21,000 per year. I was, because I was a salaried employee, I was subject to only two weeks of vacation per year. But that salary was 21,000, right? Now that was 2005, 2006. So, you know, adjust that 21,000 for inflation.

That's, you know, what the equivalent of, we'll say, I don't know, maybe $30,000 in today's dollars. But to the person who earns a full-time salary in today's dollars of $30,000, you know, what do they do? Because they're right at that entry level. Yeah, you essentially have these three options. And if you set your intention that you know what, I want to fill my life with these many retirements, I want to retire often. And so you have time between jobs, which when you're starting out as a low paid salary employee, one of the best ways for career advancement, one of the best ways to get a significant raise is to switch jobs. If you're 22, You should be looking at switching jobs at least every three or four years to progress your career. And so if you say, you know what, between every job, I'm going to take three months off. I'm going to take six months off. And that's how I'm going to get three mini retirements every decade, these three great highlights.

So you have that time between jobs or being able to negotiate that time off or those unexpected things that you might be able to use that. mini retirement go bag. And sometimes it's even pairing things up. You know, I had a client who super burned out in her job. She was a medical professional really wanted a break. And her mom got Alzheimer's. And her mom lived abroad. And so she said, listen, I need, I need to use my medical family leave. And I need 12 weeks. And so she went overseas for 12 weeks and had this time with her mom and helped her mom get set up in like better care and figure out all the things, but had time for her active rest recovery things, had time for hobbies, had this really meaningful time, and came back feeling significantly better, not only because she was able to take better care

of her mom and get that whole situation situated, but be able to take better care of herself. And so if you think about, okay, there's these three options between time between jobs, negotiate, unexpected things might come up. And in a decade, you might be able to get a couple between the three of them, you know. It might not, it's a tough thing to perfectly plan. Okay, every three years exactly, I'm going to switch jobs or I'm going to be able to negotiate that. Although sometimes people do work into it. Like the more I think you have that intention and that vision, there was one person.

I interviewed on the podcast that I think they had done a month off and they were like, yeah, we like this. And his wife switched jobs and went to work for like an old, old co-worker. And she was like, yep, I absolutely want to work here. This will be great. A person really wanted her to join the team. She was like, only a requirement, I get a month off every summer. Every summer we're going to do an adventure.

And they were like, yeah, cool, perfect. Welcome aboard. Right. And so, no, she never has to negotiate that. No, she never has to think about how that's going to fit in. Like, she's just baked that into her career from now on. Right. For a smaller company that's less procedural, that can be part of an upfront negotiation.

What should a person do if they are self-employed? A self-employed. This is one of those things that everyone's like, oh, you're so lucky. You're self-employed? Oh, like, you're the boss. Nobody can say no to you. And you're like, I don't feel lucky at all. Being self-employed, it's such a hassle.

It is such a pain in the butt. But it's a little bit like spring cleaning in that while you're pulling everything out of the cupboards and your house is a mess and you're like, this is so much worse. This is so much worse than it was before. But as you clean and organize and donate and get stuff put back in, then you have something that's organized and neat and tidy that you get to enjoy. moving forward. So for self-employed people, there's a couple steps that you really have to think about. The first is simplifying. Sometimes we just have things that are complicated and stupid in our businesses, but we can handle it and we just deal with it because it takes more work to fix than it does just to deal with that stupid thing. And you have to deal with it. Like this gives, this gives you,

like, the clarity and the motivation to do the spring cleaning. So there's simplifying. things. You actually have to automate some stuff that you were just doing by hand because you can just do it by hand. It doesn't take that much time. You need to automate that stuff. You need to start documenting things. There's so much knowledge that lives in our head as self-employed people that it's just a pain to explain to someone else. And it's just faster if we do it ourselves. So why go through the process of documenting all of this? I was speaking at a event. And one of the people there worked for a company that all of the founders of the company were like in their 60s and 70s and they were going to retire and no one had any idea how to do any parts of their job. But they didn't want to document because it's a hassle and it's annoying.

And you kind of like feeling special. You kind of like to be the only person who knows how to do this. But you have to kind of move through all of that emotional baggage of why we let things be complicated. and hard in our businesses, and then you have to start delegating. But once it's like simplified and automated and documented, delegating becomes a lot easier. And all four of those steps are such a pain in the butt. And they're so annoying. And they take so much time and so much trial and error. But you get the reward. It's like a carrot and a stick. You get the reward of this mini retirement. And what a lot of people find is you come back.

to a business that's cleaner, that's more efficient, that's more effective, that people are actually better equipped. You are not the cog that is ruining everything now because you've managed to extract yourself and the whole thing didn't burn down. And so it's interesting when I see people will come back because either they're like, oh, I have like an extra 15 hours a week that's free. Huh. And they either are like, I like those hobbies that I picked up. Actually, like spending time with people I love. You know, I think I'm going to do a better work life balance. Or they go, I've got another 15 hours a week that's free. And all of those cool projects and cool ideas that I didn't have the time and energy to execute on, now I can. I actually interviewed

a mutual friend of ours, PT, who runs a conference about when he stepped away from the conference and had to prepare the team to run that without him for a season. But then coming back, He bought a whole other conference and he bought an accounting firm. He's like, I have all this. My team's better prepared. They're more equipped to do this. I have all this energy and this time and this bandwidth. And like he tripled his business after leaving it for a while.

That's true. I remember specifically when he bought the other conference and when he bought the accounting firm. Yeah. He did triple his business coming back. With delegation in particular, I know the challenge can often. and be that you need revenue in order to hire, but to bring in that revenue, you need to take on more projects. So it becomes this very chicken and egg problem. And that's true. Generally, for any business that is trying to grow, particularly small businesses, bootstrap small businesses.

Yeah. There's a fine line between building yourself a job and building a business that can, in very run without you. And I think it's important to distinguish those things. Like, have you built yourself a job, which is perfectly fine. You could have built yourself a wonderful job that you love. And in which case, how do you pause that or how do you shut that down or how do you communicate that with clients for a short period of time versus is this an actual business that's not just a job I've created for myself? In which case, how do I enable it to run? without me doing all of the things. You and I were talking about this pre-show.

We were talking about the distinction between what is commonly referred to as a lifestyle business versus a business business. And there can be a fuzzy line because self-employment can then turn into self-employment plus, which is when you have one or two employees plus a bunch of contractors. and then the delineation starts to become fuzzy. Right in that lifestyle business zone, that delineation does start to become fuzzy as to is this a job that you own

or is this an independent business that could survive in a world without you? If the worst were to happen, if you got run over by a dump truck tomorrow, could this business exist for the next 100 years? Yeah, and a lot of businesses do close When the person's gone, the business is gone. And so I think it does take some time in planning to think through, well, how am I going to handle that?

You know, just like a person who is maybe going to ask for, maybe do it in between jobs and take six months off with no pay or ask for three months off unpaid, you know, you have to plan those financials of this is something that is going to need to be covered. I had a funny conversation online with someone who was a dentist and was like, well, there's no way. I could take time off of my dental practice. And I'm like, well, I mean, there are rotating dentists that come in and fill. Like, if a dentist goes out on medical leave or has a baby, another dentist steps in. And he's like, oh, but that's so expensive. And I'm like, yeah, it's money. It does cost money.

Right. And this is your life. So, you know, I think sometimes with those high-paying professions, too, do you want to to burn out at 60? Or do you want to maybe spend a little bit more and interspers these breaks that could give you a career to 65 and leave you feeling refreshed and happy and not like you're being tortured by your profession? But it's a tough mental.

Sometimes it's more of a mental block. It's like paying for health insurance. People, oh my gosh, people will scream and cry and moan. I can't take them any retirement because what about health? insurance. And I'm like, you buy it. You buy it. Yes. What it is. And they're like, but it's so expensive. And I'm like, yeah, it's more expensive than what you're paying, but it's an expense, like any expense. And it's an expense you budget for. Yes, maybe you're paying 300 now and you'll be paying $1,000 a month. And that is a bummer. Emotionally, it's a bummer. But it's $1,000.

And if you're taking a six-month mini-retirement and having this epic adventure with your family, you know, RVing all across the U.S., something you're going to remember forever, that's $6,000. You're just paying $6,000. Like, just budget for it, save for it, pay for the stupid health insurance, and like, go enjoy your life. Right. I have encountered that often. I often talk about entrepreneurship and very much encourage entrepreneurship and often see that people who are used to the W-2 lifestyle, they have such a mental block around health.

insurance. And I always say the same thing. I'm like, what do you do if there is a good or service that you need? You purchase it. It's pretty straightforward. And no one ever says, well, what do you do about housing? Like, well, you pay either a rent or a mortgage, and those things are rather expensive. You know, no one ever says, what do you do about food? You go to the grocery store, and that's also very expensive. Somehow, with health insurance, because I think W2 employees are not used to paying for it, lack of being normalized to it makes it feel like a bigger hurdle than it actually is. You know, sometimes you dial back on housing or on food costs in order to accommodate for the cost of health insurance. You live in a smaller apartment than you otherwise would. You downsize

from a three-bedroom to a two-bedroom. Don't go out to restaurants as much. Like, you know, You say for it in any way that you would say for anything else. I had to put an entire chapter in the book about health insurance in the U.S. Just because every time I talk about it online, all caps. The comments are all caps. What about health insurance? So it was like, here's eight different ways to access health insurance and, like, pick whichever one. And you don't even have to pick the same one forever.

I'll have clients that, especially if they have, have a lot of medical procedures coming up and they don't want to switch doctors and I don't want to switch insurance. They just do COBRA. Do COBRA for three months. Do it for six months. Switch to the exchange. Maybe if both of you are unemployed, one of you goes back to work part-time. Do that for a year. Swap places. The other one goes back to work part-time. You know, there's so many different ways that you can put this together that really helps those many retirement intentions as well. So we've talked about how to plan for the time that you spend inside of your

mini retirement. And we've talked about how to manage your career. And where we're kind of touching on right now in the health insurance conversation is planning for your finances. Outside of health insurance, what are the other major things that a person should think about as they're financially planning for this mini retirement? One of the things I love about many retirements for people who don't love budgeting and don't love the numbers is this is a little bit of a carrot and a stick situation. It can give you a huge motivation and reward to spend time with your money because it is really helpful for a mini retirement if you track how much you spend.

If you have some idea of how much your life costs, that's useful information. And then you also, there's that side of it. And then you have to figure out how much is this adventure that you're going to take? How much money is that going to require? So it's a little bit of planning and budgeting. And then thinking through that idea of how do we grow the gap and guard the gap. So how are we going to grow that gap between our expenses and our income to pay for those living expenses that we've been tracking and the cost of this adventure? And one of the easy rules of thumb that I use for people is the concept, this hypothetical,

of what if you took off a month every other year? So in your working career, you might have 20 of these incredible adventures and plan out all 20. Make a whole array of your bucket list of 20 things you want to do. And you're going to do a month every other year. You have to save about 6.5% additional. versus whatever else you're saving. And that would cover, this is assuming you're not getting the time off paid, that would cover your living expenses, your take-home pay,

and that would give you 50% of your take-home pay for whatever this adventure is. So if you take home $10,000 a month, that gives you $5,000 for this adventure. And if you have 20 adventures, they're going to be a variety of different price points. You'll have some that are the $1,000 tango lessons, and you'll have some that are Disney for 10 days. It'll all kind of balance itself out. But then looking at, I don't think about it so much as sacrifice, but what is the thing that we want and what can we postpone now to get that?

So you're like, well, I want to be in Mexico for a month learning Spanish and eating street tacos. Maybe it's less Chipotle now, knowing that in 12 months you're going to be on the streets of Mexico out eating street tacos. Like you're still going to get the tacos. We're just going to switch those locations and those times slightly. But there's so many different ways to, yeah, to grow the income or reduce those expenses to grow that gap and figuring out what's the stuff that is high ROI for you that doesn't take a lot of effort. It's your greatest area of opportunity. It doesn't emotionally cost you much, but it gets you that six and a half percent. What I notice a About the six and a half percent formula, if you were taking one month off every other year,

is that it assumes that you're not renting out your home. It assumes that you're not renting out your car, putting it up on Turo or one of those car rental sites. It assumes that all of your existing expenses stay locked into place. But there's a way to do even better. Yes. So the six and a half percent is actually a worst case scenario. Worst case scenario. We're just, we're starting with like the simplest idea.

And in the book I talk about like, start with that. Start, start basic. Start by just putting this money in cash in a high yield savings account. Like it doesn't have to be complicated. But at one point, after you experience one or two of these, people come back and they're like, oh, this is something I'm going to do again. And it gives you that much. motivation and that clarity and that confidence to make bigger changes in your life.

So, for example, one of the people I interviewed on my podcast, they did, you know, one month adventure with their kids. They rented a lakehouse. They were very tired. So they were like, lakehouse for a month. This will be perfect. Recovery from burnout. And they came home and they're like, yep, we're going to do this every year for the

rest of our lives. This is amazing. It's tough for most people to massively upend your whole life for something that's, you're like, seems like a good idea. But after you've done it and after you've tasted it, you're like, now I'm ready to make some bigger changes. So they did kind of a big house and they hired a contractor and sectioned a little piece of the house off, turned it into an apartment and they rent out that apartment and it 100% pays for their entire mini retirement indefinitely. Just done. I figured it out. And so I talk about building up these five.

buckets of there's other ways that we can finance this. Do it basic, save six and a half percent, put it in cash, go do your fun adventure. And then once you start to feel inspired, like we can be a little bit more creative about this, whether it's real estate or investing or starting a business or all these other ways that you can generate the money to fill up. I call the in-between bucket. So you of your old age bucket for retirement when you no longer want to work. But there's this in-between bucket. Last night we were actually talking about, as the geeky kids do, safe withdrawal rates. Yep. You know, you're safe withdrawal rate for your old age bucket. Four percent. Cool. That's great. The in-between bucket, there are no rules. You can spend however much you want from the in-between

bucket because it's like a college fund. You put money in the college fund, not that your kids use 4% for the rest of their lives, you put it into use all of it because that's what it's there for. And the in-between bucket is to live out those goals and those dreams and those values. So maybe use 10% of that bucket. Maybe use half of it one year. Maybe you drain it all the way down to the bottom. And you spend a few years filling it back up. But how do we start to be more creative?

How can we fill up this in-between bucket that one of the things that sometimes I dislike about the final financial independence movement is I will get clients with half a million dollars, a million, $2 million, $4 million, and they look at their money and their money says, nope, can't do that yet. And I'm like, who else has so much money that gives them permission to do nothing? No matter how badly they need that permission. They're tired, they're burned out, they're stressed, they're overwhelmed. They feel like they're about to have a mental breakdown. And that $2.5 million says, you got no options.

You're not close to 4%. Keep going. Maybe another five years. Maybe in five years. Once you hit this finish line, you can take a break. The in-between bucket loves to say yes. If you've got a hundred grand in there, it says, let's party. Like, let's go to Europe.

Let's take a month off. Let's do the Disney cruise. And so I think it's important to mentally separate those things because sometimes people mentally put all of their money into that old age bucket. And it just says no for a really long time. We interviewed Christine Benz, who is a retirement expert from Morningstar, which what you're saying reminds me of a very similar piece of advice that she gave. She was talking in the context of a traditional retirement or a person retires from their

career in their 60s. Her advice was outside of their normal withdrawal rate, they should have a particular bucket of money that they fully intend to spend within the first 10 years of their retirement. And that's because the data shows that you tend to spend more at the start of your retirement because that's when you have health and energy typically. When you're in your 60s, you're really young. You know, you've got the energy to go travel and to play golf or play tennis or to do things. You've got lots and lots of energy and mobility and interests. And so, you know, Christine Benz said she sees people who put themselves on a 4% withdrawal schedule. And when they're in their 60s, they live more conservatively than they need to. They don't give themselves

permission to go make the most of that useful energy. And then when they reach their 70s or they reach their 80s, they're out of that sequence of returns risk window. So they actually could spend more money. But now they just often don't have the mobility, don't have the health, don't have the energy to do so, you know? So her suggestion was, all right, you can hold to a given withdrawal rate and then separately and independently from that, have a different bucket of money that is just yours to

blow when you're in your 60s. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Let's talk about that last component, which is planning for the unplanned. What are all of the ways that this could go wrong? Oh, there's so many. And the thing that's amusing to me is that it's never the things people worry about. People worry about it being too expensive usually comes in cheaper.

People worry about running out of money. Usually their mini retirement gets cut short because of this third worry, they worry they won't be able to find another job. And typically they get pulled into the workforce much faster than they intended. And it's something I talk about actually in the career, like how do we, there's like an obsession with work in most of the Western world. and you being unemployed makes everyone else really uncomfortable. And so everyone tries to pull you back into that. And we can really fuel that dynamic through our networking and being intentional of how we communicate like, I'm doing this amazing adventure, really excited to come back to my career. If you happen to hear of anything, in the meantime, while I'm gone, feel free to reach out.

Yeah, I'll be in Malaysia, but shoot me an email. I'd love to hear about it. And so oftentimes people get much more interesting job offers, much better fitting job offers than they ever would have if they would have stayed in their career. People like come out of the woodwork to pull you back into this work obsession that they have. So people worry about all of that. That's never the issue. It's all this other stuff that because they're not anticipating it can be really discouraging. One of the things I think about.

it like a messy kitchen. We've ever like made dinner and the kitchen is kind of a mess, but it's late and everyone's tired. You're like, I'm just going to leave it until the morning. And the morning comes and you're like busy, rushing to get to work. And you're like, I'm just going to leave it. But you go to your job all day. And yes, your kitchen at home is very messy, but you don't have to see it. You don't have to look at it. The break room's clean. Your desk is clean. And it's kind of easy to forget that it's a mess because you're not living in it all the time, sometimes with a mini retirement. And some people found this out during COVID. There are parts of their lives that are a little bit of a messy kitchen that they have successfully avoided

because they've been so busy at work and so wrapped up in their career. And that might be emotional pain. That might be stuff from their childhood. It might be cracks in their marriage. I had one client. He very busy entrepreneur, worked an insane amount for a lot of years, desperately needed a mini retirement. I had two kiddos. One of them was like a six-year-old daughter. Two weeks into his mini-retirement, we got on a call, and he's like, it looks like he's had the wind knocked out of him.

He's so discouraged, and he's like, Julian, my relationship with my daughter isn't as good as I thought it was. I don't know if she really wants to spend time with me. I took off all this time because I wanted to spend more time with my kids, but, like, I overcalculated how strong our relationship was. And I have this saying that, like, the obstacle is also the solution. The mini retirement will reveal areas in your life that have some cracks. But it's like also the putty that can fix those cracks because I'm like, my friend, she's six. This is the perfect opportunity.

You're on a mini retirement. Go to the playground, play puzzles, watch cartoons with her. read books, organize playdates, like, now you have the time to repair this. And it's the perfect opportunity. Now, if you would have come back to me when she was 22 and you had missed out on her whole childhood and your relationship wasn't that great, a little bit up the creek. But this is the perfect opportunity to fix this. And the mini retirement gives you that opportunity. And so there's definitely there can be a little bit of

discouragement of like hey I went to have this mini retirement because this can be all fun and all adventure and so cool every single day and now me and my wife are just fighting all the time and like what the heck I should just go back to work

maybe maybe we can't be around each other this much maybe it's better if I just focus my attention somewhere else and the reality is like no buddy now is the time to fix it. Like you've been given this great opportunity you see that there's a problem and you have the means to do something about it.

So that's definitely one of those areas that can kind of take the window to people's sales a little bit when they first start until they kind of wrap their mind around. This might look a little different than what I thought it was going to look, but it's really good still. Like I'm going to be doing really important things with this time. Often work can be an escape mechanism, particularly among people who are highly accomplished. Work is the route through which they and myself included, work is a route through which I avoid other problems in my life. It's a fantastic avoidance mechanism. It's a socially sanctioned one.

And it rewards you for it. Yeah, exactly. It rewards you for your avoidance. Exactly. My avoidance is not through alcohol or through gambling or through any of these mechanisms that are looked down upon by society. My avoidance is through this route that's actually highly praised by society. It's avoidance all the same. Yep. Meaningful and enjoyable. I have a lot of clients in their mid-30s, late 40s that have been outweighed. running an avalanche for a long time. And they just thought, I'll just run faster. I'll just run harder. And this is never going to catch up with me. And it worked great in their 20s. And it worked great in their early 30s. And then that late 30s, they start to get tired. And they feel it barreling down.

And there's this fear of if I stop, the avalanche will overcome me. And I think it's better. to stop and come up with a plan of how we're going to deal with this, then to just be buried by the avalanche. But there is that fear of if I slow down, if I give myself time and space to deal with all of the things I've been avoiding, it's too much. Why is the late 30s typically a... I think it's the point where we get fatigued.

Because we've been doing it for 15 years already. I see right around that 15, 20 year mark, it starts to take a toll. And our bodies aren't quite as adapt as they were maybe at 21. And I think there's a lot of extra pressures further in our careers. Maybe our parents are aging. Maybe we have kids. Yeah.

And it starts to catch up with them. But a mini retirement, a well-timed mini-retirement can give people the time and space to productively and successfully reset and restart because the next 20 years of your career, I have to run in desperation to I'll run this avalanche or I will be crushed. You could feel joy or feel relaxed or feel happiness or contentment. There's other things that are available to us other than just better keep running as fast as I can because I can't look back. So what we've covered, so far are the four major components of what to think about as you embark upon a

mini retirement. We've talked about how to manage the time inside of that mini retirement. We've talked about how to manage all of your career implications, the career implications that come out of taking one. We've talked about how to manage the finances of that mini retirement. And then we've talked about the unanticipated, which is highly psychological or emotional. The part that people don't plan for. Yeah. Because people plan for the logistics. Yeah.

Let's close this out by coming back to your story. In the beginning of the interview, we talked about your first few mini-retirements. So let's close this out at the end by talking about your last few, your most recent mini-retirements. Where we left off, Micah was 19 and your second child was four. you were a mom of two. Let's fast forward to more recently, how old are your kids now? And I would assume that some of them have grown up and are out of the house? Or where are we? Paint a picture of some of your last few mini-retirements. Yeah. So eight years ago, Adam and I both took a year off. And because we had gone from that four-year-old was now, I think he was six or seven. And he was the only one at home after Micah had passed away. And then we adopted a sibling group of three. And then we had a surprise baby.

So we went from one to five in the span of two years. Wow. Yeah, it was fun. So we took a year off. And we had also bought our house and that rental property. It had just been a really busy season in our lives. And it was kind of a career pivot for me. It was when I started writing and when I started doing creative.

work was about six months into that time. Before then, I'd always felt that I grew up very kind of wheat and cattle, blue-collar, hard, hard-working stock of people in Montana, and creative work always felt very indulgent. It was like something that, like, rich people could do and we do jobs that we get paid on Friday because, like, we're responsible, hardworking people. But since then, we've done usually one or two big adventures every year. So this last year, we did a six-month road trip. We have a hard-sided camper now, not a pop-up camper, but took all the kiddos who are currently, where are we at? 17 to 8. Ages, yeah, age is 17 through 8 or 8 through 17. Yeah, so we got 8, 11, 12, 16, 17. Wow. Yeah, they're not itsy-bitsy anymore.

And when we took that first year off eight years ago, I was just surrounded with like drool and diapers and like little tiny shoes everywhere. They were constantly lost. And now we're in this whole new season of life. But yeah, we did a road trip from Montana, like Chicago, D.C., went down to Florida and then back up. And it's been such a, like those years of traveling. Now my kids are like in high school and junior high. And so I think they want to be in school throughout the year. And so I feel like this last trip was probably our last big family adventure like that.

But I'm so excited we had eight years of them, eight years of incredible adventures during that season. I've heard so many people say with multiple kids, it's impossible to get all of their schedules to line up because summer in high school and summer in middle school and summer in elementary school, their school breaks happen at different times. And some of them are in sports and the sports have certain schedules. And so with multiple kids, they're struggling to get all of the kids' schedules to line up in order to take some type of extended mini-retirement. How did you manage that? It's a hassle. And it feels impossible. And you're like, there's no way we can pull this off.

And then you just decide you're going to do it and figure it out. When we do six-month, eight-month trips, all sports, all activities, all of that is on hiatus. We just have to say, no, we can't. We're going to be traveling. We're not going to be doing that. They love traveling. We do so many fun things. We go so many fun places. Every day is an adventure. One of our kiddos was like, I really want to do Boy Scouts. And I'm like, child, have you seen our life? Do you know what we're doing on a daily basis? We are living Boy Scouts here. You do not need to go and like, no, we're doing it altogether as a family. Having those different seasons as a mom, especially with lots of kids, I kind of let myself off the hook that not everything has to be perfect all the time. We'll just do lots of really good things and we're going to fill our lives with lots of really good things. But every birthday isn't going to be 30 kids and themed and like crazy gift bags and decorated cakes like maybe every once in a while, but not everyone. And instead we're going to get season passes to Universal and go over and over and over. And that's going to be our thing that year.

And it's going to be a variety. All throughout their lives will have different, fun, cool experiences. And sometimes they'll be in sports. And sometimes they'll have cool stuff with their friends. And sometimes we'll be on fun adventures. Have you ever had the experience where one of the kids has said, no, I don't want to do this. I don't want to travel. Every darn day.

Every darn day someone complains about something. Yeah. So I joke with the kids. There are three points in which you could be happy about this. There is before we go, you could be excited and happy about this. There could be while it's happening. You could be happy about this. Or in retrospect, looking back at certain points in your life, you will be happy about this experience.

There is seven of us. So there are 21 moments where we could be happy. we're not going to hit 21 for 21 every single time. Unrealistic expectations. So, yeah, sometimes people get to be grumpy. And sometimes they're grumpy for a day or an hour. And then I buy them a donut and they're not grumpy. And, you know, it's fine.

I'm not always happy all the time either. And that's a good way of looking at it. There are 21 data points here. So let's see if we can just get a simple majority. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for spending this time.

with us, where can people find you if they'd like to learn more? Retire often.com. And on social media, I'm at Gillian Johnsford. Thank you, Jillian. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one. Many retirements help you enjoy life special moments now rather than waiting for traditional retirement.

Because you can enjoy it now, you get to experience things that otherwise would have expiration dates, like traveling with your kids when they're young, when they're eight instead of when they're 18, or not instead of, but in addition to, because the experience will be so different at those different ages. And there are many activities with expiration dates, spending time with aging parents or aging grandparents, doing physical activities while you still can, or being with people, loved ones who might not be with us at some point in the future. Many retirements give us that opportunity to lean into those small seasons of our life because they're not going to wait until we're 65.

You can't postpone every good thing in your life. And I remember getting to the end of that trip and thinking, I couldn't do this in 20 years. We do this now, but there's no way a whole bunch of 20-year-olds are going to load into a pop-up camper for 10 weeks to go to 10 national parks. We enjoy this now or that season is gone. and it won't ever come back. And so that's the first key takeaway, rather than this binary, like, work, work, boom, retire.

Why not sprinkle many multiple mini retirements throughout your life? That's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two. There are four essential components to planning a successful mini retirement. So there's time management, there's career strategy, there's financial planning, and then there's preparing for unexpected challenges. In order to have a quote-unquote successful mini-retirement, if you will, to define what success even means in this context, first, define two or three really clear intentions for how

you want to spend that time off. Don't try to accomplish too much. Don't have 10 intentions. Pick two or three. The fewer, the better. In terms of your career, you'll want to position your break as beneficial to both you and to your employer or to you and your industry, if you're going to be doing this between jobs, and financially, save at least six and a half percent of your income if you're planning a monthly mini-retirement every other year. And then finally, prepare for the unexpected emotional challenges that often surface when you step away from work. There's a huge temptation to, over schedule and to be a little too ambitious. Because there's so much of life we have to get

caught up on for a lot of people they've maybe worked years or 10 or 15 years consecutively. They haven't had a break for so long. And it's really easy to be like, okay, there's 150 things I want to accomplish during this mini retirement. But factoring in, you might be a little burned out. So you might have less motivation. You might have less energy. You might need more rest. Finally, key takeaway number three, mini retirements can reveal and heal cracks in your personal life that you've been avoiding through work, because work often serves as a socially acceptable escape mechanism that helps us avoid dealing with problems in our relationships or in our emotional health. And a mini retirement can really bring these issues up to the

surface, but it also gives you the opportunity and the time to address them. So use the opportunity of your mini retirement to do some of that inner work in addition to enjoying the travel and the external, also focus on the internal. I went to have this mini retirement because this is going to be all fun and all adventure and so cool every single day. And now me and my wife were just fighting all the time. And like, what the heck? I should just go back to work. Maybe we can't. around each other this much. Maybe it's better if I just focus my attention somewhere else. And the reality is like, no, buddy now's the time to fix it. You've been given this great opportunity you see that there's a problem and you have the means to do something about it.

Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Jillian Johns Rood. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First, share this with all of the people in your life, friends, family, colleagues, coworkers. Share this with your kid's soccer coach, with your mail carrier, with your best friend from third grade, with your tech support person, with your emergency contact, with your cashier, with that parent at the school pickup who always shows up looking a little bit like a hot mess. Share this with them. Share it with all the people in your life because that's how you spread the message of living with great financial intent. attention. Number two, follow the journey, go deeper into these topics by reading our newsletter. We publish once every now and again. When we do publish, I like to go deep. I like to offer insights and thoughts and ideas that are rooted in first principles thinking. So if you're curious about that,

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