How You Can Enjoy a Mini-Retirement Every 2 Years, Without Risking Your Career

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About This Episode

Do you frequently find yourself feeling overwhelmed and spread thin? Like you can’t catch up with life, no matter what you do? If so, a mini-retirement—or 20 mini-retirements over the span of your career—might help.

• (02:20): Introducing Jillian Johnsrud and the idea of mini retirements
• (04:00): How to actually structure a mini retirement
• (08:55): Why you should practice retirement before you reach FI
• (12:30): What do you want out of your mini retirement?
• (20:20): Three tools to help visualize a mini retirement
• (28:58): How to build your narrative story
• (36:25): Figuring out your career alongside mini retirements
• (42:00): How to approach mini retirement as a high-performing professional
• (58:20): The finances behind making mini retirements possible
• (01:06:11): How to afford US healthcare
• (01:14:34): Trends when trying mini retirement for the first time

RICH GIRL NATION IS HERE. GRAB YOUR COPY.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Jillian Johnsrud’s book: Retire Often
• Previous The Money with Katie Show episode: “A Sabbatical Will Change Your Life”

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Transcript

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Do you often feel like you can’t catch up on life? That no matter how much you work or try to stay on top of a to-do list, it proliferates faster than you can check things off of it. Do you frequently find yourself feeling overwhelmed and spreads thin? What a month off work help? What about six months off work? What about a year?

That was my infomercial attempt at introducing today’s guest, which is a person that we have spoken with before on this show. We last heard from her about two years ago in September, 2023. I am of course talking about Jillian Johnsrud, who joined me for an episode called A Sabbatical Will Change Your Life. And we’re bringing her back today to discuss her new book, Retire Often: How Anyone Can Take Multiple Career Breaks to Unlock Adventure, Advance Their Career, and Find Financial Freedom.

And I have to say, it’s rare when reading the blurbs of a book will make you just tingle with a sense of possibility. But I just want to read you this one: “The idea of taking a career break is an anxiety inducing proposition for most high performers. Retire often bridges the gap between the terrifying void in your imagination and creating the most fulfilling transformational time of your life. With Jillian’s clear guidance and coaching, your mini retirements will be well-planned, thoughtfully executed, and propel you to your next growth phase with confidence.”

And I mean, hell yeah. So with that, please enjoy this conversation with Jillian Johnsrud.

So Jillian, thank you for joining me again on The Money with Katie Show; you’re a repeat guest now.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Thank you so much for having me.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

When I was reading your book, I was struck by where you first discovered your idea for what you came to call mini retirements. Can you tell us a little bit about that original inspiration?

Jillian Johnsrud:

Well, all the cool kids who were 19, I was reading the Old Testament because that’s what I did for fun. But yeah, there was this idea of you take a day off a week and then you take off a year every seven years. And I was like, that’s brilliant. I love that idea. And me and my spouse at the time, we had piles of debt and we both chose low earning professions, which is a fantastic combination. I wasn’t like, we’ll totally be able to retire early, but this idea of what if we just took a year off? What if we just took a little break? Because I’ve always been the kind of person that like, okay, I don’t exactly know how I’m going to get there, but I still have these kind of ambitious goals and dreams. There’s things I want to do, even though it doesn’t make perfectly logical sense in this moment, being 19 with lots of debt and no money, I was still like, but I want to travel the world and I want to adopt kids and I want to buy a home and all these things that felt impossible. So this idea of a mini retirement, I was like, well, maybe this is a tool. Maybe this is a way that I could have access to accomplish some of those dreams before I’m 65 or 70.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And you talked about how this ideal mini retirement has a specific structure. It’s not just like, “I’m going to take a month off and just binge Netflix.” So what is that structure? How do you think about this?

Jillian Johnsrud:

First, I guess I’ll define what a mini retirement is if no one’s ever heard that term. I define it as like you said, a month or longer. I think a month is the minimum effective dose stepping away from your primary career, that nine to five. And the third one is to focus on something that matters to you, something that’s meaningful, which to your point, it’s not just like pinging Netflix for a month, although I will say it might be recovering from burnout. That’s a huge motivation for a lot of people. I think most recent studies, like 89% of Americans have experienced burnout in the last year. It’s a pervasive issue, but you don’t recover from burnout by bingeing Netflix. That doesn’t work.

And so thinking about what it is you really want to focus on what would be meaningful right now in this season, and then creating a kind of structure to accomplish that. And a lot of people I talk to, they’re like, they have this bucket list. They’re like, there’s 47 things I want to do. I just burst the bubble and say, please pick three things. Ideally pick one. But if you have to pick three, pick three. But ideally pick one and set it up as phases that you move from one to the other. Because if you try to focus on 47 things, you won’t make any progress on any of them, and that’ll be really discouraging.

But it also creates this weird effect of, and I’ve seen this in real time, where people have competing goals and no matter what they’re doing, they don’t know if they should be doing that thing, but they’re pretty sure it’s the wrong thing. If you’re like, I want to start a business and recover from burnout and spend time with your family and you’re having lunch with your mom, but you’re like, but maybe I should be working on my business, or you’re working on your business and you’re like, should I be taking a nap? And you’re taking a nap and you’re like, I definitely should be working on my business right now.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

It sounded like kind of offhanded like well, and watching Netflix is not how you recover from burnout. Why does sitting around binging Netflix cure burnout?

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah, so burnout, it’s actually brilliant. I think it’s one of the human marvels in that biologically it helps us get out of a bad situation. So if you are experiencing famine in your country and you have to walk 3000 miles to a different area, it’s burnout that allows you to move through hard things and survive. But it does that by reducing your creativity, reducing your motivation for other things, it narrows that vision. And so you need to find ways to really rest and rejuvenate and give your body the signal of we’re safe and we have access to rest now and Netflix watching movies, things like that can be restful for some people a little bit. Some of the time.

I do tend to think about what’s the minute-by-minute ROI on this activity? If my stress level is at a seven and I watch two hours of Netflix, maybe it reduces to a five. So it moved me two spaces in two hours where I encourage people to think of what are more high ROI in that maybe going for a walk with a friend, maybe that takes you an hour, but you go from a seven to a three, that’s a much better return on investment or maybe doing meditation or taking a nap or a bath or going for a bike ride or doing some creative riding.

So I encourage people to think of what are activities that are also restful for you that you have more energy at the end of them than you did at the beginning of them. If your goal is to recover from burnout for that week or two week or month plan, usually four to six of those restful activities every day, it also creates some anxiety. If you went from a very highly structured routine like you’ve been so busy and your schedules had to be so intense to go all the way to nothing, I usually encourage people split the difference. Whatever structure you have right now do half as much structure because it can feel very untethered to just drift into the nothingness there. Again, you’re not really sure what you’re supposed to be doing, but you’re pretty sure you’re doing the wrong thing.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I’m glad you said that because I think that when I imagine applying this in my own life, the idea of total nothingness does seem a little existentially fraught. I’m like, I don’t know if I would want to dive into that immediately and we will get into that. We will get into the existential ness of it all. But another thing that jumped out at me, especially as somebody that spent a lot of time over the last couple years getting quite embedded in the FI or FIRE world and reading and listening to a lot of FI content is you say that one of the major mistakes people make is waiting until are financially independent to begin practicing the FI lifestyle. What do you mean by that?

Jillian Johnsrud:

If you met someone that’s like, man, I’m so excited about running a marathon. I’m obsessed with this idea of running marathons. It’s going to be awesome. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be great at it. And you’re like, that’s so cool. So do you run at all? Have you ever done a 5K? They’re like, no, no, no, no, no, I’m not doing a 5K. Actually, my plan is I’m going to sit at my desk for 60 hours a week, but I’ve listened to some podcasts on marathon running. I’ve read a couple of books about it. I’m going to be great. I’m going to be so good at this. Not going to practice at all. I’m just going to jump right in and then marathon for the rest of my life. It’s going to be fantastic. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and you’re like, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, best of luck with that. And mile 18, they have leg cramps and they’re being carried off on a stretcher.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh my god, mile 18. I’m like mile 1.8. I would be like, oh, this is not what I thought it was. So I guess in this analogy, you’re just saying you should practice retirement. If you think you want to retire, you should be practicing retirement.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah. There’s this weird thing where sometimes we forget that we’re not great at things we’ve never done. If you’ve never been retired, you might not be awesome at it. Day one and retirement is a huge transition on so many fronts. It’s a transition in your friendships. It’s a transition in your family time. It’s a transition of how you structure your time, how you devise meaning and purpose from things, the hobbies you enjoy.

What if you took this vision of retirement and just started doing little experiments, started testing some of these out, test that hypothesis. You’re like, I think when I retire I would love to travel around the US in a camper. Cool, how about we do that for a month? Let’s try it for two months. And then either you go, this was amazing, I love this. And now you have even more motivation and clarity to get to retirement or you’re like, there are some kinks in this we need to figure out, or you’re like, this was the worst idea. I dunno what I was thinking.

But the great thing is you’re not at retirement, so you’ve got some time to come up with some new dreams to come up with some new ideas and test those before you jump all the way in. And especially in the FI community, people get a really intense one more year syndrome, and I think it’s because you’re going into an unknown and intuitively that it’s a big transition and you’re not prepared for it. So of course you’re going to push that transition and that change off because even if you feel tortured, there’s a comfort and the familiarity of things that are known versus unknown.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Something that I find interesting about your work is that, and you touched on this a little bit already, but I want to spend some more time on it. You guide people with one big picture question, what do you want out of this? Happiness is about reducing suffering. It’s also about adding meaning. So you provide a few main focus areas that often come into play in people’s mini retirements, and I read them sort of as not justifications, but reasons why this is something that no other path can fulfill. This is going to give you something that you actually cannot get in another way. Can you highlight some of your favorite framing devices or focus areas that you guide people toward if they’re kind of in that open-ended phase of considering this but not really being able to visualize it yet?

Jillian Johnsrud:

Sometimes when we’re in the thick of something, we think this will last forever. I’ll always be in the season of my life, but occasionally zoom out and you go, oh, this is a season with an expiration date. This opportunity isn’t indefinite. I did a road trip with my, I had five little kids the time they were all itsy bitsy and we did 10 weeks in a pop-up camper. We went to 10 national parks, and I remember we’ve probably gone through seven or eight parks at that point all out west. We were in Yosemite and my kiddos were maybe two to 10. And I just remember thinking, oh, this won’t last forever. I can’t do this trip in 20 years when they’re all in their twenties and thirties. They’re not all going to take 10 weeks off to pile into a popup camper with me. I either do this thing now or I grieve with the fact it won’t ever happen.

And there’s moments when maybe your parents right now are young enough to hike through Ireland with you if you wait 20 years…maybe, but maybe not. And so I think we have this sense of things around us will change, and those seasons have expiration dates and even I love the new health and wellness focus that is becoming so popular, but one downfall is that, or one maybe missed perspective is that yes, you can keep up your muscle mass. Yes, you can keep up your…

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Protein intake.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Heart rate and all of these things and your body fat percentage, your preferences still change and what you enjoy. I did a road trip coast to coast when I was in my twenties with my best friend in my green Honda Civic, and we slept on people’s couches and we slept on the frozen ground and we candy for breakfast and almost got trampled by bison and it was so cool and I’m never doing that again.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh yeah.

Jillian Johnsrud:

I am 42. The season of my life in which I sleep on the frozen ground has expired. It has passed. I’m so glad I did it. But at 42 now, my body requires vegetables. I can’t just eat candy for breakfast even though I loved that so much. So I think menu retirements give us this opportunity to lean into those things that you have that sense of either we do this now or maybe we don’t have the opportunity to do it.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

The other thing that you pointed out that jumped out at me was this idea of there are some things that you just can’t squeeze into a weekend or a week-long vacation. Maybe you take a week off work. That’s a pretty good vacation. I think that that’s typically the full week is what we think about as a capital R, capital V, Real Vacation. There are a lot of things you can’t do in a week. And so if there are goals or hobbies or aspirations that you have that don’t fit into that framework of taking one week off two or three times a year, then this is the path for that.

I also think that when we talk about this, when I first hear about many retirements irrespective of you, right? People taking a year off, taking a sabbatical, I’m like, ah, well, that’s only for super rich people. Or people with a lot of privilege can pull that off, but normal people can’t do this. But I wanted to highlight something that you bring up in your book kind of just like off the cuff. You’re like, yeah, my family, which is you and your spouse and five kids live in 1700 square feet, that’s the size of your home.

And I think that when I read that, I was like, oh, there’s a real element of conscious lifestyle design here. You’ve just mentioned earlier that you guys chose not super highly paid professions. It’s not like y’all were bringing in half a million dollars a year and resting on a trust fund when you decided that you were going to do this. And so I’m sure you get this a lot. What do you say when people say, that sort of break—it’s just too unrealistic.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah, I think there is this idea that this must be so expensive, and part of that might come from taking the model of we’re going to take a week off and we’re going to go to Paris for a week, and oh my gosh, we spent $5,000 on that week off. And so they kind of take that number and say, well, if I’m going to do eight weeks off, this is going to be $40,000.

The math doesn’t math that way. I interviewed someone on my podcast who, him and his fiancée did six months, half in Southeast Asia, half in Europe. They rented out their place while they traveled. They spent less traveling than they did at home. They saved money by going on this trip. And so there’s lots of ways to make this affordable and it really scales depending on how much money you normally bring in and that you’re accustomed to spending.

I met someone in a medical office, a receptionist, and I came in to check in for my appointment and she is just bubbling over the moon, so excited. She’s chatting everyone up and she had just, I live in Montana, she was maybe 22, 23 and probably makes like $12 an hour. She had just come back from a month in Peru and she starts telling me about this and she’s like, I had never left the state of Montana. I had never been on an airplane. And then she went to Peru for a month. That’s crazy. And she was like, I didn’t even just go to the cities. I went to the jungles of Peru and I’m thinking, Paddington Bear adventure here. The deepest, darkest jungles in Peru.

But what an incredible once in a lifetime experience. But the reality is, okay, a plane ticket, maybe she spent 700 bucks, maybe she got points and saved points for a year. Maybe the plane ticket was free. How much did this actually cost? It might’ve cost her $1,000, $2,000. So let’s say it was $2,400 and she took a year dog sitting a couple times a month to make that extra $200. This isn’t a huge impossibility to take a month off and do an incredible adventure.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We’ll get back to this conversation with Jillian after a quick break.

You also offer three tools for people if they want to turn what could be a mediocre break, I feel like a month off, no matter how you’re spending it is probably going to be at least decent. But you talk about the fact that it could be personally transformative with the right approach. And I think the tools that you outlined were impactful for me in a different way because they made me see the point of the break.

They helped me imagine something worth working toward beyond just, well, I want to feel caught up on my life stuff like, oh, I have an expired license or I haven’t. I’m two months behind on that dentist visit and I just haven’t gotten around to scheduling it because every time I get some free time, there’s something else that needs to be done. And I would love to know a little bit more about the specifics of finding that clarity and if there are exercises that you recommend that people do.

Jillian Johnsrud:

I’ve had to walk a lot of people through this, and so the book is very specific, exactly how do we do this? What are the steps? And I find when people are thinking about a mini retirement, we kind of fall in one of two camps. Either they’re like, I’ve got 47 things I want to do. I have no idea what to do next. What’s my next mini retirement? That makes sense? What is it that I need right now? What makes sense financially career wise, or I have no idea how I would spend that time and that’s terrifying.

And so for both people, we need to find what’s the next thing that’s going to be meaningful and enjoyable. One of those tools that I like is it was an exercise I borrowed from David Bach had put it in his book years ago. He called it Be Have Do, I renamed it because I thought these labels were more intuitive, but listing out things that you would describe as your identity, things that you would relate to as activities you would want to do or possessions that you would want to have.

And it’s an exercise I do every year just for myself on little Post-It notes: What are parts of my identity? Am I a writer, a gardener now I’m a tango dancer? Am I a good friend? Am I a reader? And you start to look through those and do the same with those activities. What are the activities that resonate with you? Is that hiking? Is that traveling? And it gives you the sense of what isn’t well represented right now in my life. What are things that just don’t have a lot of time and space? I’m a tango dancer, but I haven’t actually done that in a long time or that doesn’t have as much space. I learned tango year ago, I’m totally obsessed. For me, going to Argentina for a month would be amazing and just studying tango for a month, but it also can show you some things that are aspirational. I wrote a book and I had wanted to write a book for a long time that had been one of those bucket list things for me.

And so you see those things of like, man, I’ve always wanted to travel in Europe or always wanted to learn Spanish, and you realize I haven’t had the time in this space to do that yet. And a mini retirement is just the tool that could allow you to fulfill those things that are so core to your identity. And so I think whether you don’t have enough dreams or you have too many dreams figuring out what is it that I need right now? What is it that I want right now in this season of life?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I think what comes up for me when you say that and what’s kind of making me chuckle is that right now I’m like, oh, I just want a break. I just want a break. It’s a pretty uninspiring desire in that way. It’s more of taking things away versus adding things in.

And there is a funny reflection in the chapter about burnout that I wanted to talk to you about that when you were young, you just assumed that middle-aged people naturally became more boring, that middle age itself biologically turned people boring. But of course you explain that what’s happening for many people is simply burnout, narrowing the options and the energy reserves that they had to dream a little bit bigger and that the stakes of existing in a chronic state of stress are pretty scary. You outline some of them, decrease in brain matter, decreased cognitive function, physical fatigue, mental health disorders.

And what I sometimes find hard to gauge is honestly how to even identify chronic stress. I imagine for some people, after many, many years of being in that position, it just becomes the baseline. You just adapt to it or you stop registering it as abnormal. I don’t know what that analogy is of the two fish swimming and one is like, oh, the water feels warm today and the other fish is like, what’s water? That’s kind of the feeling.

And when you mentioned that gal who had just come back from Peru, I’m getting this sense of you could really feel that this was a person who was totally live wire with energy was totally refreshed. And that meeting someone who is creative, who is fresh, who’s intuitive, who’s full of life, it really sets them apart. So I guess I wanted to talk to you about both sides of that coin or both ends of that spectrum, the depleted markers of, hey, here’s how you even realize that you’re a fish in this water and what actually might be possible for you.

Jillian Johnsrud:

So as a good rule of thumb, everyone’s different, but a good rule of thumb, I see if people have done hard continuous work for about 15 to 20 years and haven’t had a substantial break, they’re probably burned out. And this is kind of the sensation of outrunning an avalanche. It works until it doesn’t, and then one day it doesn’t and they have lunch catches up to you. And so one of those indicators is I try to have people imagine what was your personality energy motivation like before that season of hard work, maybe when you were 20, were you excited after work to go eat dinner with your friends? Were you excited about new hobbies? Did you want to take new classes? Were you excited to meet new people? Was that energizing? Did you have creative ideas at work of like, oh my gosh, we could do it this way or we could do it that way.

Or what if I did this with my life? And that burnout was kind of like, it just starts to steal that motivation and it starts to steal that creativity and that gumption to where your friend’s like, Hey, I’m going to go do a painting class. And you’re like, oh God, yeah, yeah, it’s been a long week. That sounds fun. It doesn’t sound fun at all. Just sitting on your couch sounds fun, but you’re not like, oh my gosh, I’ve always wanted to take painting. And that seems amazing, and I’m so excited about that. Just that enthusiasm and that joy and that, oh, this feels so good in my mind and my body that starts to, like I said, that I just thought middle aged people were boring. They didn’t dream big dreams and they weren’t ambitious and enthused and they didn’t see the joy and the wonder in things.

And I’m like, oh no, they’re just tired. They’re so tired. We’re just so tired. And I get it, but I’ve seen just in real time, people in their mini retirements, it’s like they’re rolling back the clock after a month. They feel if say, I’m 42, they feel like they did when they were 39 after six months, they’re like, oh, is this how I felt in my early thirties? Maybe after a year they’re like, oh, this was the vibe that I had at 25. And I think, like you say, we developed that baseline and we rationalize it other ways. I’m just more realistic now. I just have responsibilities now. I have things that I have to take care of. I can’t be excited about a hobby that somehow in our mind, paying a mortgage means we can’t be excited about a piece of art. Those things aren’t correlated. You can pay a bill and be really excited about listening to a new band. Both of these are possible to coexist if you’re not burned out.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I’m really happy that you use this example because I immediately started thinking about myself in college, especially freshman year of college. I had just gotten out of this very strict and very intense college prep high school where I was studying for eight hours a day after school and working and just had a lot of stress for a 17-year-old and then off to school taking 12 credit hours in a store. I mean, it was just like life’s a party. I’m down for anything. And it is actually so funny to think back on that period and wonder how much of that that I have always just chalked up to like, oh, well, I’m different now because I’m an adult with a job. Versus like, oh, well, you also just weren’t stressed and you hadn’t had years of work experience that you haven’t really meaningfully ever intentionally recovered from or tried in any real way to carve out time for other things.

Again, I love that you used the word responsible. It does feel like a lot of it nestles under that label or justification of responsible, realistic, this is what adults do to piggyback on the responsibility piece. You aren’t unrealistic about the fact that you recognize that people that want to do this also probably want to find jobs later, probably don’t want to blow up their entire careers in the process. And that the first step in doing this responsibly is crafting your many retirement story you write. For many hard work means continuous work. Hard work means sacrifice and suffering. It means being realistic and letting go of childish dreams or goals. If you are having too much fun, relaxing too much or pursuing hobbies, it’s a sign that you aren’t serious or perhaps even lack moral strength. Walk me through and sketch the connection for us here between those internalized assumptions and crafting a narrative around the many retirement, either for yourself or for others. Why does that narrative matter and what function is that serving here?

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah, people in work centric cultures have real big feelings around work and real big feelings around money. And so everyone’s going to bring their assumption; if you leave it a blank slate, they’re going to bring their assumptions. You might have your assumptions. And what I see even more commonly is if you don’t craft the story, you’ll be scared of what they might be assuming. You’re going to be projecting, well, what if they think I’m lazy? What if they don’t think I’m motivated? What if they think I don’t take my job seriously enough? Who’s going to want to hire me if I stepped away for six months? What does that say about me?

And you get to decide what that says about you because you can look at the exact same situation and you can apply different meaning to it. We’re meaning making machines. We love to figure out the meaning of things.

And I played basketball in high school and very intense team, very intense program. And every game we took a halftime and you could say, well, if you are dedicated to the game, why would you take a break? Are you lazy? Do you not care about winning? Are you not motivated? Are you not dedicated to this craft? Oh, no. We were very motivated and we were very dedicated and we cared exceptionally much about the outcome. And that’s why we took a break because we wanted to win. And this is the way, this was the tool of how we were going to win. This was the time that we regrouped, we refreshed, and most importantly, we re-imagined what that second half of the game would be. Because sometimes when you’re in the thick of it, things aren’t going well in the first half. You need to take a pause and go, let’s write a new story of how the second half’s going to go.

Because if you just keep going in the bad story, your actions will stay in that same bad story. It’s most helpful if you create the narrative of what this mini retirement means and whether you’re going to use this to negotiate the time off with your current employer, which is absolutely an option. And what I encourage people to start with, whether you’re going to use this to explain it to your coworkers or explain it to friends and family, they’re like, why are you leaving your job and have those conversations or whether this is the narrative you’re going to bring into job interviews? Explain why you have this three month or month or six month gap in your resume. And I encourage people, there’s four elements of the story that I think on a human level resonate with people.

The first one is to make it positive. “I was so tired to look at y’all’s faces. I just needed a break. This industry sucks and I’m out here.” No, it should be positive, something positive. Do something interesting. Instead of, I just went home and watched Netflix. You hiked the Camino, you got your yoga certification. You did something interesting with the time. The third one that sometimes people don’t think about is make it specific if possible. So I could say, I want to spend more quality time with my kids. That’s positive. Kind of interesting maybe. But when I said I took 10 weeks to go to 10 national parks with my five kids in a pop-up camper, that’s positive. It’s interesting and it’s very specific. It’s a specific way we spent time together. And then the last one, frame it as a one-time thing. Not like every summer we’d go to the beach and do this thing, but I hiked to the Camino.

That’s a one-time event, the 10 week trip to 10 national parks, that was a one-time thing. We did not ever replicate that trip again. So frame it as a one-time thing. And when you get those four things, it’s compelling and it pulls people in and it crafts a story of why you did this thing. Because the reality is someone could say, if you take a mini retirement, you’re lazy or disorganized or don’t care. The reality is it takes a tremendous amount of courage. It takes creativity, it takes organization. It takes gumption to go out and to do this logistically hard thing and to have this big benefit. It’s why not everyone does it because it’s not easy to pull off, and that makes you a better qualified candidate. It makes you a more interesting person.

And like we talked about, you come back with a different vibe, a different energy. I always think it’s interesting when I meet new people and we’ve hung out for a little bit, and then they’re like, oh, so do you have kids? And I’m like, yeah, I’ve got five kids. And they’re like, what? They’re like, you seem five so rested for that. Exactly. I seem too well rested. I seem like I have too much energy. They’re expecting me to be worn down and disgruntled and just barely hanging on. And they’re like, your energy does not, you can’t be a fun rested person. And I have children, and I’m like, well, you could. It maybe both can coexist.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I think there are different types of many retirements and different relationships with the employment situation that you have. So you have the one to three month break, which you point out are actually often possible to negotiate as leaves of absence without actually separating from a company. So I want to talk to you about that and how that works.

There’s also, if you’re going to take six months, if you’re going to take a year, you probably are going to have to leave the company and then go find another job later. So we should also talk about that. But there are a few specific steps that you highlight here to increase the chance of success, particularly if you are negotiating a one to three month leave of absence from a company that you would like to stay employed with. Can you tell me more about that process and what you’ve seen work really well?

Jillian Johnsrud:

The book’s highly specific because when you’re sitting in front of a person, they’re like, Hey, how do I have this conversation? Be like, you can’t just be like, have it. It’ll grow great. It’ll be easy. They’re like, no, no, no. What exactly do I say?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

What do I say and how do I warn them ahead of time that I’m going to say something that’s going to upset them, right? Yes. What you do recommend, do you recommend the heads up email? So walk me through it.

Jillian Johnsrud:

A heads up email, and it’s a weird little piece of psychology, but there’s a little bit of, and it sounds silly, but the five stages of grief. When your employer first hears, I want to take a leave of absence first, it’s kind of like anger. Absolutely an awful idea. And then there’s a little bit of denial. There’s no way this is happening, but you want to get them to this bargaining stage where they’re like, okay, hold on, hold, hold on. How do we figure this out? How do we make this work?

It gets them into that kind of collaborative creative energy, which I talk about a lot. So just sending a quick heads up email like, Hey, I’ve been thinking about doing this big XYZ. I would love to have a chance to talk about how we could make this work and send that. Maybe if you’re going to have the meeting on Tuesday, maybe send it on Thursday. So you give ’em a little bit of time, a little bit of heads up, but then you’re going to craft that four point “here’s the narrative.” Here’s the story. You pitched the idea, but the other logistical emotional labor you need to do is you need to come up with all of the reasons this won’t work or will be logistically challenging and all of the solutions.

And the trick here is you articulate the challenges and you bring the solutions. It creates extra emotional work for them to have because you’ve already pitched this amazing idea. You said, hey, my mom’s turning 60. Her and my dad always really wanted to bike through Croatia when they retired at 60. It’s been a lifelong dream and my dad’s passed away and I would love to have a month off to be able to go do this dream with her and bike through Croatia, got a week of PTO, I would need three more weeks off.

You’ve pitched this thing that they’re like, oh, that sounds amazing. They’re already emotionally invested in it, but there’s challenges. So articulating those challenges for them just saying, hey, I know this might be a challenge and these kinds of meetings and we have this project coming up, but here are some solutions that I’ve come up with. And it doesn’t have to be a perfectly tailored plan, but you’re showing I understand and I see the challenges and I’ve thought through solutions, let’s work this out together in a really, really creative and collaborative way. Because it probably won’t be one meeting, it might be a couple meetings.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We will be right back after this break.

There was one story that you told that I really liked about a guy that you were helping who knew like, man, I would be radically rejuvenated if I could just get a month off. I just need a month away. That’s it. I don’t need a year. I don’t want to leave this company. I just need to press pause. But he felt like I’m just too critical to this organization. I’m too important. I’m too high up. I’m too highly paid to be granted such an extreme request. How did you counsel that person? What do you say to someone that’s having that sort of reaction right now of like, oh, I wish, but I matter too much to this company?

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah, it’s a really common challenge of we’re too important. Our knowledge is too specific. Nobody can do what we do. I’m a CFO and nobody else does my job, so I can’t get a month off. I’ve known a lot of CFOs, I’ve known a lot of C-suite executives, and I’m like, okay, cool, cool, cool. So if you left, how long would it take for them to replace you? That’s a really hard role to fill backend knowledge. There are recruiters that just recruit these kinds of roles because they’re hard to fill. And he’s like, yeah, that’s a long process. That might take six months or more. And I’m like, yeah, that sounds right. Okay, so how long would it take for the new person to get up to speed to maybe hopefully perform as well as you have in 15 years in this company?

He’s like, yeah, it’s a long process. That would probably take another six months, maybe a year. I’m like, yeah, that sounds about right. Okay, so they could either give you a month off or this position that’s critical and no one else can do will sit empty or underperforming for a year.

Your job becomes, how do I make my mini retirement the easiest, simplest, cheapest solution? And you don’t even have to be super heavy handed with this because HR knows they know the cost and the risk of replacing employees. They’ve done classes on this in college. You don’t have to be super heavy handed. You can sprinkle it in. I love at this company, I’m so excited about these projects.

We have a little good news, bad news, good news sandwich here. You start with the good news and then the bad news of I would really love to hike the Camino, my 40th birthday’s coming up. I’ve always had this dream, so there’s a bad news, the good news of, but I really see so much future with the company. And then you sprinkle in, I would really hate to give up my career here, just a little sprinkle at the end. I would hate to leave.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So that’s the little line you drop to be like, implication, I could, and then you’d really be screwed.

Jillian Johnsrud:

You can just sprinkle it. You don’t have to be heavy in because they know how difficult it is to replace people. How risky, how expensive. So you sprinkle that in and then you say, but here, I know these are the challenges and I’ve thought of solutions and giving you that month off is the easiest, simplest thing.

And something I actually didn’t include in the book. It’s a little bit more US specific is that if you’re experiencing burnout, if you’re having those slight mental health challenges and you have FMLA, just get a doctor’s note. Just say, I need medical leave. You could get up to 12 weeks. Interesting shortcut. It’s a little bit if you found out you had breast cancer and they were like, but you know what? It’s stage one. You can still go to work. You can still do all the things. And you’re like, yeah, I’m actually, I’m surviving. I’m doing okay. I’m getting up. I’m doing my job. I don’t feel awesome, but I feel pretty good. I think I’m just not going to get treatment. We’ll just see. We’ll see if it gets worse. And then I’ll get treatment, maybe stage four, maybe stage five, then we’ll look into that. But I think I’m surviving. That’s such bad advice. It’s so much easier to treat something. It’s stage one then waiting until you get to stage five.

The treatment’s easier, cheaper, simpler, more effective. It’s so much easier to treat burnout on the front end when you are still getting out of bed. You are still going to work, you are still functioning versus, and now I’m having a mental breakdown. Best of luck, everyone. I hope you all figure it out.

And medical professionals get it. It’s not like, well, I don’t know if I have enough evidence to support this. No, they see this all day long. They’re like, yeah, sweetie, you’re burned out. That’s a thing. Let me send this little piece of paper and take your time off. Go get refreshed, get in a better spot. It’s like if you got injured working out in the gym and you’re like, you know what? I’m just going to keep going. It’ll be fine. I’ll just keep working out. I think I’m surviving. No, just take a break. Take a couple of weeks off, recover, heal the muscle, and then come back. Full strength, come back as your best self versus limping through for the next year or two.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

If somebody is listening to this and they’re like, yeah, I think I actually might more than three months, or alternatively, three months is fine, one month would actually be fine. But I think that actually the problem is this job or I actually don’t want to be at this company anymore. I’m trying to make a much larger change that either it involves, we’ll say severing this employment relationship, diving into the unknown without another employment relationship, figure it out for the other side. It occurs to me that people probably feel nervous about becoming irrelevant in their fields, or, hey, if I disappear for six months, if I disappear for a year, what happens if it takes me another year to find a job? Now I’ve just…

I think that it’s very easy to spiral in that way without the assurance that something will be there for you on the other side. And I’m curious what you recommend people do or how to approach and think about that very real fear.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah. One, always be networking. It’s kind of like always be selling, always be closing, but always be networking, building those relationships and maintaining those. I encourage people, have a plan before you leave of how you’re going to keep in touch with people, how you’re going to reach out to people. Don’t fall off the grid for six months and then magically reappear.

One of the kind of tools that I encourage people to do is to send out a goodbye email. Like, hey, love to work in the company. I’m going to be traveling in Europe for six months, but I’m really excited to hopefully our paths cross professionally when I return. And if it’s a close circle or if you feel comfortable saying, I am committed to this trip, but if you hear if anything pops up in the meantime, if you hear of anything, feel free to reach out. I’d love to hear about it.

And it’s surprising to people once your coworkers, past employees or network knows that you’re available, and this is a weird psychological thing, but you’re off doing something cool that isn’t work. There is this compulsion to pull you back into work. It opens this loop that they feel the need to close. And it was something that I had seen in my life, but I saw a lot in the FIRE community because people would’ve retire early and they would leave. And then six months in, they’re like, so I got this dream job offer. People have been reaching out and I just can’t say no. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a job. They get these better jobs that no one had ever offered them a random job. And now people are coming out of the woodwork to pull them back into this professional work life.

And even though they’re financially independent and have technically retired forever, they’re working again six months a year later. So you can leverage that natural tendency. And I encourage people think about how to, what is the specific challenge you’re facing? Because we can have this generalized anxiety, and I kind of compare it to fog. It’s just this free floating fog. Well, what if or what that condense it into an ice cube, what exactly are you concerned about? Because then we can problem solve that. And that’s different for everyone.

For medical professionals, it might be licensing and training and certifications. If you’re in an industry that changes rapidly in tech a year later, my skills won’t be relevant. Okay, well, how do you keep your skills relevant? If that’s the concern, how do we problem solve that? Do you take a class in the middle of your year off? Do you go to a conference? Do you still do these networking events? Do you do some self-education? There are ways to problem solve all of it. If you can identify specifically what the issue is. I had a client who was leaving a government job in one field. I was thinking about contracting in the same field, but privately I was like, what if people forget about me? What if I’m off doing these cool things and people don’t know that I have the skillset? And I’m like, okay, so how would you get people to not forget about you? How would you connect with them? How would you meet up with them? And she’s like, well, there’s this one big conference once a year and everyone does it. I’m like, okay, during your mini retirement, you can still go to a work conference.

You can still take a continuing education class. You can still meet up with people for lunch or connect with them on LinkedIn. You don’t have to disappear. And you can decide if you’re going to take six months off. You know what, three months in, I’m going to start being more intentional about checking on the job market, checking on how things are looking in my industry, reaching out to people, seeing if they’ve heard of anything. Give yourself that runway. And even if you, it’s kind of a weird piece of advice, but even if you’re like, I hate my job, I never want to come back here. Maybe don’t close the door. Yeah, leave it open. If they say on the way out, gosh, we would really love, I know you need to do this thing for six months for a year, but would you be willing to come back when you’re finished? Which is a really common thing that people get. We’re okay with you leaving, but just please come back.

And you might not be sure. You might be like, I kind of hate it here. I don’t if I want to come back, I kind of want to do something else. You don’t have to close the door and you don’t have to make the decision then. So what I encourage people to say is be like, thank you so much for that. That’s a really interesting idea. I would love to have a conversation about that in maybe six months. Could we have a time to brainstorm what this would look like and how I would come back to the company? Because who knows how you’re going to feel in six months? Sometimes absence makes the heart grow fonder, and you realize that if you’re not burned out, you actually kind of like the work you do.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Something that really jumped out to me about in the book of people that you’ve worked with who have done this and these very normal natural fears is just how often the mini retirement turned into a career leapfrog situation where they ended up in a better position than they would’ve been if they had just stuck around it shook things up and opened them up to new opportunities that staying on that original path would not have presented to them. And I found that pretty compelling for somebody who might really care about their career, and it might be about more than just the brass tax of how am I going to pay for this? Or what happens if it takes a little bit longer and more about, am I going to be really damaging my career by doing this? That was one of the strongest points I think that you made is this often in a really ironic way, leads people to even higher paths than they had previously been on.

And you talk about business owners too, and how if you are self-employed, okay, well, the preparation process for something like this might take a little bit longer. It might not be three months of getting your ducks in a row and logistics and problem solving and making your case and taking your time. It might be six months, it might be a year that you have to really put systems in place and get really creative about how you’re going to set something like this up so that the business can either run without you or you can, if you don’t have employees, really press pause. That also I think is a reasonable and important thing to keep in mind is this isn’t something that you just decide to do when the following week, pull the trigger their logistics, but logistics are solvable and that if it matters to you, you can take the time and make it happen.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah. I joke with it’s true self-employed and employees, but self-employed feel it. More many retirements are logistically challenging and emotionally fraught.

That’s the catch, that’s the caveat, that’s the price of admission. But once you go through it first, the first time of everything, your first marathon, it’s the hardest the first time once you go through it, once it gets easier and easier, but with your business is a little bit like minimalism. If during one of my mini retirements I went through and I got rid of half of our possessions logistically challenging, emotionally fraught, that was the price of admission.

But once you do it and you go through, it’s easier to maintain that. It’s easier to do it again, the first time’s the hardest. And in your business, it’s a little bit like creating a high performance vehicle. You don’t just switch one thing. You’re not just bigger engine. And that’s all we need. Every part of the system needs to be tweaked in your design, in your suspension, in your tires. All of it needs to be adjusted a little bit to make it high performance.

But I’ve seen many retirements make people’s businesses high performance. And the reality is you could and should do this, all these things without taking a mini retirement. But they are logistically challenging and emotionally fraught. And the mini retirement is like the carrot at the end of the stick. It gives you the motivation, partly because it creates a deadline. You’re leaving. If you’re going to go hike the Pacific Crest trail, you’re going to be gone.

And so all of this has to get figured out by a very specific date so that your business doesn’t implode while you’re gone. It’s actually still there when you return. But I had a friend that I interviewed, he runs a big conference and it was like his whole life. It took all of his bandwidth, all of his time, all of his energy. And then he stepped away for about 18 months. Whoa. And had to do all of this work that I outlined in the book, like simplifying and automating and documenting and delegating things and raising up that team. But when he came back, he was like, oh, it doesn’t require 40 hours a week of my time. It doesn’t require all of my emotional bandwidth. And he bought another conference and he bought another business. He tripled his business because he did the work to step away. And then he had that time and bandwidth to honestly what business owners should be doing, like their highest point of contribution. When you take a mini retirement, it forces you out of the weeds and it forces you to figure out how to deal with the weeds without you dealing with the weeds. And then you can come back and work on bigger, better projects.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So the money piece of this, the financial piece of this. Obviously money management, something we talk about a lot in Money with Katie land, both in Rich Girl Nation and in our personal financial management system, the Wealth Planner. So I have a feeling that people that have listened to this show or are quite familiar with my work in these other places, or they know about expense tracking, they know that they need to be figuring out what their margin is and saving and growing that margin. And they’re more familiar than your average person with these types of topics and how to go about doing that.

You have a chapter called 6.5% for a lifetime of many retirements, where you show one month off every two years, basically beginning in your early twenties all the way to your sixties for 20 mini retirements throughout life. Can you walk us through that math? The six and a half percent?

Jillian Johnsrud:

And six and a half percent is the worst case scenario.

Just to put that upfront. I don’t think it has to cost this much for a whole bunch of different reasons, but I always like to go with the worst case scenario. So that is you’re taking a month off and it’s going to be unpaid. You’re not getting any partial payment, you’re not getting a severance, there’s no additional income. You don’t have passive income coming in yet. You don’t have rental properties, you don’t have anything. You just have to cover a hundred percent of your take home pay that you would normally cover.

And so that is about 4%. If that 4% for two years, that would cover your one month of take home pay off. And then we have to budget for how much is this adventure going to cost? And like I mentioned, you might break even on it. This budget might be zero. But worst case, I say budget up to 50% of your take home pay.

So if you bring home $3,000 a month, give yourself an extra $1,500 a month for whatever this adventure is. If you bring home $10,000 a month, give yourself an extra $5,000 a month for whatever this adventure is there. Again, that very much might be your worst case scenario. People typically find it to be much more affordable than they think, but just in case, that 50% is about 2.5%. So you add these together and you have to save an additional 6.5%, which can initially you’re like, oh, things are so tight. I can feel overwhelming.

But thinking through, it’s not traditional retirement where it’s like, hey, you really shouldn’t eat that Chipotle burrito bowl because in 40 years you’re going to want to buy a new car when you’re retired. So we need to allocate your every Friday Chipotle burrito bowl to this goal 40 years in the future, which can feel really stupid and hard and annoying. It’s like, what’s the point? Because life is so hard already. Why can’t I eat Chipotle? But what I’m saying is what if instead of that Chipotle burrito bowl, now in two years, it’s street tacos in Mexico because living there for a month and you’re learning Spanish.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

It’s a little more appealing.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah, 52 weeks—so a hundred, you’re giving up a hundred Chipotle burrito bowls and you’re going to be in Mexico for a month. That’s 90 meals. That one trade will pay for all of your food. You’re trading one thing for another. You’re trading something average for something extraordinary that’s just right around the corner. So it has a much shorter feedback loop to how are we going to pay for this?

And you might be looking at, maybe you’re buying a new car and you’re like, oh, do I want a $300 car payment, or should I stretch and do a $600 car payment? I would like to have a nice car. But if you’re choosing between that or you’re like, that would actually pay for all of my mini retirements. Would I rather do a cool adventure every other year for my life or drive a slightly cooler car? And I can’t make that choice for you. But when you know that those are the two choices that you’re making for yourself, what feels best in my body? What resonates with my goals and my values and my dreams for how I want my life to look? And then you get to make that choice of which sounds more compelling.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So to summarize, we’re talking about, let’s say your save rate right now is, I’m just going to throw out some numbers to try to make this feel real. Maybe you’re saving 20% right now, and that 20% is pretty much just going into 401(k), IRA. We’re talking about long-term retirement savings. Your point is that really, I actually, I’m adding this. You can either say, okay, I want to keep that the same because I really want to retire in 30 years or whatever. And then you can add an additional 6.5% to that savings rate, and you’re just tucking that away in the high-yield savings account for your month long mini retirement, 23 months from now.

Or I think another option if you already have a high save rate is maybe you’re not saving additional money. Maybe you’re just peeling 6.5% away from those long-term savings and going, this is actually now my mini retirement fund. This is a rotating account that I’m filling, deploying, filling, deploying, and you’re creating that cushion for yourself over those two years to be able to take this month off.

Jillian Johnsrud:

And if we play with this hypothetical idea of you started this at 20 and you’re doing this until you’re 60, you get 20 amazing life-changing, meaningful adventures. So if your original plan was, I want to retire at 60 with a million dollars, but you did all of these mini retirements come 60, you might not feel the same urgency to retire partly because you’ve done all the cool things you wanted to do in each season of life that it actually made sense to do those things.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And you’re also going to be so good at retirement by then.

Jillian Johnsrud:

You’re going to be so good.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Like, oh my gosh, I have so many hobbies and interests now. I just spent all this time cultivating them.

Jillian Johnsrud:

But the other side is like you talked about, sometimes you find more interesting, meaningful work as you go with each job change. So sometimes by the time people get to that point, they don’t want to fully retire because they’ve landed in a really sweet gig. They’ve landed in a really sweet rhythm. I had one client who was an executive in a very male dominated industry for her whole career, but because of that, she had mentored all of these other females as they came up through this career. She retired, she thought kind of fully retired at 55, but now all of these people she had mentored are now often they’re running their own companies, their executives in their own industries, and they’re like, so we have this problem and we know only you can fix this. It’s a big logistical problem. Could you just come in for three months?

Could you come in and fix this thing and fill this role? And once it’s fixed, then we can hire a normal person to do this, but we need your exceptional skillset and you’re the only one we trust because you’ve been that person our whole career. So now her retirement is just mini retirements. She takes the summer off and Jen gets out of the lake and goes on the boat, and then she’ll work for two or three months in this contract position, and then she’ll take time off for Christmas. She’ll take a few more months off, and then maybe she’ll do six months.

And why would you leave that?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That sounds really fun. To be completely honest.

Jillian Johnsrud:

She gets to flex her knowledge and her skillset and her expertise, and people appreciate what she does, and she’s well compensated for it and appreciated, and she gets the best of retirement. If we reimagine this idea of a 40 year working career and then 20, 30 years of retirement, you can enjoy retirement throughout that 40 year career. And then in retirement, you can have the best of both because you’ve built this really unique, flexible, different way of approaching your life and your work.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

There is one big flashing red light. One big question. I have saved it for the end. What the heck are Americans supposed to do about healthcare? For folks who are taking the shorter sabbatical, the one to three months they’re staying with their current employer. My guess is that the most straightforward path for most of those people is going to be just negotiating, staying on the health insurance plan during the time that they’re away, the unpaid leave. But what about the people that are going to, they’re gone for a year or they’re doing what you’re describing with this client who I do a contract for three months, six months, and then I take six months off, and then when I’m ready again or something interesting again comes up, I come back in. I think that the health insurance piece of this makes a lot of people very uneasy about longer term departures from corporate life. Can you speak to tactically practically what this really looks like when you’re finding health insurance yourself?

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah, it freaks Americans out so much that I did a whole chapter on it. My publisher was like, we really want the whole book to just be worldwide, nothing too US centric. And I’m like, okay, we got to talk about you this healthcare though. Americans are going to freak out. They’re like, no, but this is an obstacle. Every other country, there’s so much more chill about it. They’re like, oh yeah, here’s the process. It’s not that big of a deal here. It feels like a really big deal.

But the first caveat that I’d like to put out there is that especially as Americans, we have an enormous emotional resistance to paying more for healthcare. We don’t view it any other bill that we pay. It’s like the most torturous bill for me. It’s like buying snow tires. I hate buying snow tires so much.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So Montana of you.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Studded snow tires every winter, really dislike spending money on that. It’s like the worst $700 I ever spend. And I think we feel the same way about healthcare. That’s the worst money we ever spend. And so if someone’s going to take six months off and we go through all the things that I’ll talk about in a second, and you’re like, okay, so this is going to cost me an outrageous amount more. Maybe I’m paying $300 a month and that’s a sweet deal and I’m going to be paying $1,300, I’m going to pay a thousand dollars more a month. And you’re just like, oh, it makes me sick to my stomach and you’re taking six months off. Okay, dude, that’s $6,000. I know it’s a lot of money, but it’s still $6,000. It’s a specific amount of money and you have car payment, or maybe you have a house payment or you have a loan payment. There’s other things that we pay money for because they’re valuable.

But it’s like any other expense, you can budget for it, you can save for it and you can pay it. And if you think back in 30 years, would you be like, man, I did that amazing six month trip and with my kids, or with my spouse or my sister and I had such a great time, but shoot, I spent $6,000 on healthcare. That was so stupid. Why did I spend that money? I could have just stayed at my job and only spent $1,800, but I spent $6,000. Like, ugh, bad life choice there.

So I think sometimes we have to get through just the emotional side of spending more money on healthcare and just how stupid that feels. But that is what it is. So on the practical side, yes, stay on your healthcare if you’re doing a short one, if you’re doing a midterm one, Cobra is expensive usually, but it’s easy.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And what is Cobra?

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah, so you can stay on the same healthcare plan that your employer provides. The amount of time is always in flux. It changed during COVID, and I’m never sure when it’s changing back, but COVID extended it for a ridiculously long amount of time. But you can stay on the same plan. So same plan, same doctors, same network, same everything. And you just pay the full amount of whatever that cost was. So maybe you were paying $300 a month and your employer was paying $700 a month. You pay the full thousand for a lot of months, and that is an easy option. So I’ve had clients that are stepping away and they have a bunch of medical procedures already scheduled and they’re like, we don’t want to switch health insurance. Maybe other options are cheaper. We’re okay paying a little bit more because it’s convenient.

And the other thing is you don’t have to make one choice for the whole time if you’re going to be off for a year, sometimes we think, well, we have to make the one perfect choice. No, you don’t. You can mix and match. You can switch this up. You can say, I’ve got this big medical procedure plan. I’m going to stay on Cobra three months, and then you know what? It’s going to be open enrollment and I’m going to switch to the exchange and I’m going to find a plan there because that’s going to save me some money. And I don’t mind switching at that point. And then maybe you do the exchange for six or seven months and you’re like, actually, this is going really good. I think I’m going to launch a business, but I’m going to need healthcare longer now and I can’t really afford that. So maybe you have a spouse, maybe they go back to work and you get on their healthcare plan.

Maybe you take a part-time job just for the healthcare while you start your business and you do both 50 50. There’s lots of, my point is there’s a number of different options, but a little bit like my metaphor of free floating fog anxiety. Let’s make it really specific. Let’s shrink it to an ice cube. What exactly are you concerned about and how do we problem solve that? There are a number of solutions and a number of price takes for that. And the reality is if you’re doing especially longer money retirements, your income might drop. You might not have money coming in, so you might qualify for subsidies. And as crazy as it sounds, some people spend less on healthcare not working than they did while they had healthcare through their jobs.

So I think there’s an assumption it’s going to be so much more expensive. Maybe not. My encouragement is just sit down for an hour or two hours or three hours and figure out exactly how much would this cost, run the different scenarios so that you’re looking at real numbers, not your make believe imaginary scary. What if it could be this, but like, okay, this option’s a thousand, that option $600, and if our income drops at this point, it would be $300 a month. Okay.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah. I had a friend who after graduate school didn’t know what she wanted to do, and so she had spent a lot of time job searching and networking, and she lived in California at this point and through the California health insurance program, I think Medicaid in California, I think it’s called Medi-Cal, and she ended up getting on that for the time being, and it was great. It was fine. She had no issues with it. So I think that there’s also probably some of this that varies quite a bit by state, where some states are going to have quite robust things in place for you and other states where there’s basically nothing. I mean, we know at the federal level there’s really not much beyond, to your point about the exchange going on the Affordable Care Act marketplace and buying yourself a plan. But I think you’re right.

I think that the ambiguous ambient to stress of, I just know that this is a complicated and expensive part of this, that actually sitting down and being like, all right, let’s pretend right now that I had to go find health insurance. Let me block 60 minutes and go see what I could get. I think that that’s a really good point.

Since this is such an unorthodox way to plan a life and a career, it’s understandable that even if you can pull it off, even if financially, career wise, emotionally, you get yourself ready for this and you do it and Okay, cool, we’re two weeks in, right? If we’re taking our money retirement, that people don’t always know what to expect and that sometimes it can feel a little bit uncomfortable actually. Or I think that your example earlier of like, oh, well, I don’t really know exactly what I should be doing right now, but pretty sure it’s something else. Or that how I’m spending this time is wrong. You note that there are two sort of major reactions that people will have, or two major outcomes that you’ve observed this trend. What are the two camps that people fall into when they do this for the first time?

Jillian Johnsrud:

And this is specifically dealing with how much energy people go into their mini retirement with. And it can be, I mentioned this in the book, because it can be tough to predict what it’ll be for you. And so I like people to know, here’s the range. All possibilities are fine. Love that, all of them are good. There’s no wrong choices, but it might not be what you expect.

And on one end of the spectrum, it’s kind of the hyper productive. They’ve been working 60, 80 hours a week in their job and they have all of this adrenaline and cortisol and momentum, and they just take it straight into their mini retirement and they knock out a whole bunch of house projects and they visit 27 countries and they go do all the things, and then they start to eventually start to slow down a little bit and find a more medium kind of vibe.

On the other side of that spectrum, if you’re extremely burned out, we talked about that function of burnout is to get us out of a difficult situation. And it’s so good at that, even though sometimes we hijack that to be like, hey, I was being chased by a bear and I survived. Maybe I should just be chased by bears all the time. I’m awesome at being chased by bears, our biologist. No, no, that the point running from the bear. That wasn’t the point. The mom to stay away from the bear. But once our body has access to the rest, you will fully feel the weight of the burnout.

So maybe you only partly felt it because if you fully felt it before, you might sit down in the desert and die. You won’t keep walking to find the food. You can’t feel how tired you actually are else. You won’t keep going. But once your body’s like, ooh, we have access to rest, it fully feels the way and that adrenaline starts to come down, that cortisol starts to come down and it’s this deep sinking feeling and people are like, oh, I’m real tired and I didn’t expect to be this tired. And they can create all sorts of unhelpful stories in their mind about what it means.

But I compare it to you’re recovering from the flu. You don’t want to get out of bed, you don’t want to unload the dishwasher. You want to take a nap. This does not mean you’re a lazy person. It does not mean you’re unmotivated. It does not mean that you cannot thrive outside of the structure of work. It just means you’re recovering. But people create all of these stories, and I put this in the book to encourage ’em. A more helpful and a more true story is, man, I’m more tired than I expected. Good thing I’m on a mini retirement, I’m going to take a nap. No more unnecessary emotional suffering needed. Just be like, I’m tired, but I’m on a mini retirement. Perfect. This works out great.

And for people who experience that burnout, they slowly rise up to the middle over time as they recover. Just like when you recover from the flu, you start to feel better, you start to have more energy. You get out of bed, you do things and you’re like, ooh, actually I’m really tired. And you go back to bed, but the next day you have more energy and you go to the grocery store, you start to come out and find, I find both groups meet right around the same baseline.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I appreciate that range of outcomes because I think that I’m glad that I read that and learned that before attempting something like this so that I wouldn’t immediately panic of regardless of the energy management side of that spectrum, if I were to fall on one of those extremes and be like, oh my God, I’m doing it wrong, or like, oh my gosh, am I always going to feel this way? I think that’s the other fear, and I think it takes longer than you might expect to find that balance or find that middle. We can be impatient, I think, about that recovery process.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Because most people have never done it. And going back to the you are not great at things you’ve never done before. If you’ve never recovered from burnout, you are making a prediction of how long you think it will take based on no evidence. You have no data points. It’s a random guess, which is cute, but then you can’t feel bad about yourself that you guessed wrong. It was just you pulled a number out of a hat and you said, this will take three months. So there’s a reason I called the book Retire Often instead of, “Take one massive epic mini retirement.”

Because the more you do it, the better you get. Next time you’re burned out, you’ll be dialed into, okay, I’m going to take this minute of retirement. First month is going to be rest, or based on how I’m feeling, the first six weeks are going to be rest, and then I’m going to go do these other things. But the first time you’re just guessing because you’ve never recovered from burnout before. So of course you don’t know how long it’s going to take or what it’s going to look like or how to do it. These are all new things you’re learning.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It was really, really lovely and I got a lot out of, and ended up feeling quite inspired by your book, which I needed, so thank you.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yeah, I appreciate it. My hope is that I think people like the idea of many retirements, but then there’s all these concerns and the book, I just went one by one, one by one. We’re going to go through every single concern, every fear, every hesitation. We’re just going to talk about it and we’re going to problem solve it.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Melt down those ice cubes.

Jillian Johnsrud:

Yep. We’re going to make the ice cubes and we’re going to problem solve them. And I hope that by the end, people are like, oh, actually, it’s not that difficult. It’s actually a lot more feasible than maybe I believed it was.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That is all for this week, and we’ll see you next week for an interview that I did previously on someone else’s show.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.