9 ms·

Embracing sabbaticals, sunsetting retirement age

83 points by matesz 3y ago

gabereiser 3y ago
I’m 100% on board with this if this means people will be able to actually save for a sabbatical. The reasons why pensions existed to begin with is that workers were pretty poor savers. Then the biggest pension generation voted that it’s pensions for me but not for thee and changed everything to 401k/IRA/Big Mattress and turned it back on the worker to figure out. All while keeping wages down as the world costs increase. One of the best things you can do is live debt free. Even if that means living in an RV or on a boat or tiny house or grandmas basement. Live debt free. Don’t become entangled in needing to work to survive. Living paycheck to paycheck because Bank of Pain needs their flesh.
- iso1631 3y ago
  > Live debt free. Don’t become entangled in needing to work to survive I don't know about you but with no debt and no income I wouldn't survive very long, as I need annoying things like food.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    I never said don’t work
    - vikramkr 3y ago
      > Don’t become entangled in needing to work to survive If you need to work to get food, you need to work to survive
      - gabereiser 3y ago
        You’re right. So don’t let it get to that point. Work and live below your means. If you are working full time and struggling to put food on the table then take a look at your debt. Work and save so you have 2x more days not working than you do working.
        vikramkr 3y ago
        Which is fair if you don't like your job or don't get intrinsic satisfaction from making more money/increasing your lifestyle. If you're working full time and struggling to put food on your table, that probably means you're trapped in one of the various poverty traps or financial spirals like healthcare costs that plague this country. These are very hard to get out of and telling ordinary people to just be the kind of extraordinary person who can escape that situation is not just utterly useless but also counterproductive. We point to the folks that have either through extraordinary skill or effort or luck gotten out of those situations and use them to justify perpetuating broken and exploitative systems that trap people in poverty and debt by claiming that clearly people can get out. "Just take a look at your debt" is among the most infuriating things you could say to someone in that situation. Oh it's that easy is it? Just "look at my debt"? Ive gotten enough exposure to the flip side, the lender side, of these stories to see how we (meaning literally the people I went to school with) deliberately engineer these systems to exploit you. You're not just "looking at your debt." You have to escape a system engineered by Yale lawyers and Wharton mbas and internet grifters and psychologists and marketers and financiers and salespeople and mortgage companies and private equity (who owns your land, hi appolo!) and Berkshire Hathaway (who owns your mobile home) and hospital administrator and so so so so many other people
        gabereiser 3y ago
        We are all presented the same choices (granted from different levels of privilege) and we all make decisions. Health care costs are ridiculous, I agree, and people shouldn’t go broke if they get sick. That said, they shouldn’t be eating garbage and things that make them sick. You can’t complain that your finances are drained from cancer all while your whole life you ate Taco Bell and McDonalds. Choices have consequences. Debt is a result of that. There’s really only two maybe three kinds of good debt. Everything else is a salesman trying to get you roped into a payment scheme like you describe. It’s the ultimate bazaar, backed by the lawyers and justice system saying you agreed to pay. Don’t agree to pay for things. Stop buying crap off Facebook. Buy a used car instead of making payments on a new one. Love yourself and stop trying to keep up with the neighbors.
  - liquidpele 3y ago
    Have you considered eating the rich?
    - GenerocUsername 3y ago
      Get your iOs-flavored socialism outs here
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    You should work on building up savings then.
    - esafak 3y ago
      That's what people spend their entire working lives doing, so they can retire on those savings.
      - Zambyte 3y ago
        And this thread is about changing that...
      - iso1631 3y ago
        At a population level that's where rent increases to extract every spare cent from workers. Sure an individual worker can earn more and spend less, but at scale if everyone does that means that the excess money is taken by land owners.
        gabereiser 3y ago
        It doesn’t have to be this way. It didn’t used to be this way. Rent control helps not just renters but keeps runaway property values from occurring due to renters. Without control to keep the industry from raising rents to 99% of what you can afford, we’ll continue to see what you describe. If I know humanity, it’s that they will always find the next sucker.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    I could feed my family with part-time odd jobs, not a “real job”. Still working, but less and with more freedom. Health insurance and healthcare bills would be what made it impossible, even with no debt.
- vasco 3y ago
  The idea of the post is based on the fact that this period would be covered by the same social security fund that covers retirements right now in most of social-democratic european systems, so you don't need to save for sabbatical the same way you don't need to save for retirement under these conditions.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    I’m aware, and I’m 100% behind it. It’s the right move. For Poland, for mental health, for invigorating the workforce. I complain about the US system because it’s sooo backwards and it’s what I know. It’s also being used to model other European efforts to eliminate pensions and retirement efforts.
- flatline 3y ago
  Living debt free feels great, and is a huge privilege. Debt is perhaps the biggest economic driver humans have invented. It gives people leverage they would not otherwise have. College. Small business. Home improvement. Of course there is the downside of usury, payday loans, cc debt, medical debt, inflated education expenses, and all the other troubles caused by debt. But well-chosen debt can be a godsend.
  - neon_electro 3y ago
    Especially when it's interest free - thanks, BNPL startups and venture capital! I appreciate interest free loans at your expense.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  >Then the biggest pension generation voted that it’s pensions for me but not for thee and changed everything to 401k/IRA/Big Mattress and turned it back on the worker to figure out. With very low cost target date retirement funds and near free index funds, there is no difference other than cutting out middlemen defined benefit pension fund administrators. All the money is going to the same place, backed by the same federal government. The bigger problem is that while it is easy to vote more money into existence, it is not easy to vote more labor and materials into existence.
- pc86 3y ago
  Defined-benefit plans do not work. Maybe you can pick out some arbitrary 20/30/40 year window where they did, but with current demographics and projects demographic changes the math just doesn't add up. At least with defined-contribution plans you are able to save for yourself rather than just hoping your retirement fund is still there in 50 years and having to save for yourself on top of that.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >Defined-benefit plans do not work. Or at least they were generally oriented towards multi-decade employment with the government or a large manufacturing company. There were pension fund protections put in place over time and I won't personally regret having a modest payout from a long-ago employer whose pension fund has made it through a couple acquisitions. But defined benefit pensions are another case of tying important benefits to an employer which people shouldn't generally favor, especially today. It's nice having a small lottery ticket I was probably only vaguely aware of at the time but it's not really good policy.
gumby 3y ago
This is excellent reasoning. "Retirement" as it is thought of today, is a fairly recent phenomenon and was originally thought to be quite brief. From my experience long periods scattered through your life is better. I was able to retire in my early 30s and have just engaged in intense multi-year periods of work since, always with gaps of a year or more afterwards. It allowed me to spend more time as a parent, more time with my spouse, and to spend time doing fun activities I will not be able to do in my 70s. I think some professionals will have trouble adapting to this because there will be a strong impetus to "advance their career" rather than take a gap. But encouraging this mode may encourage people to take these gaps, and in fact improve the balance vs today's system in which it's mostly women who have trouble advancing because of time off with the kids.
- sojournerc 3y ago
  I have had a bit of a forced mid-life (37) retirement for the last 6 months due to being laid off. It's actually been really nice because I'm lucky enough to have enough savings accessable, so it's been a nice low-stress time to recover from working at a start up. What's absurd to me is much of the money I've saved is in a traditional IRA that I reasonably can't touch without penalty until I'm 65 without doing some advanced financial planning like a Roth ladder which requires planning at least 5 years in advance. Hard to plan for being laid off.... My parents died at 68. That they paid social security for their entire careers and got so little is absurd. It's such a shame to me that culturally we emphasize career over life experiences and expect people to wait until their life is ending to enjoy it.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    > My parents died at 68. That they paid social security for their entire careers and got so little is absurd. Do their children (i.e. you and your siblings if any) get to access it? If yes, it’s not a complete waste.
    - sojournerc 3y ago
      Nope, my brothers and I inherited their private savings, but no public benefits. My mom received a portion of my father's air force pension after he passed, but not us since we weren't dependents any longer.
jawns 3y ago
I would love to see sabbaticals become more the norm, but I see a few problems with this particular plan and other problems with how they are generally implemented. For this specific plan, it asks a 35-year-old to agree to work an additional year in their 60s for 3 months' sabbatical in their 30s. That's a pretty bad deal, not only because of the imbalance between what you gain and what you sacrifice, but also because there are so many unknowns about your ability to work in your 60s. And how do you really enforce something like that? But in general, one major problem with sabbaticals is that they are almost always tied to your employer and require you to rack up multiple years of experience to qualify for them. But the trend over the past several generations is toward greater job mobility. It is relatively rare for Gen X and Gen Y workers to have stayed with one employer for decades, as many of their parents may have done. Job hopping is often the best way to increase one's compensation, and the loyalty that used to be shown between employers/employees has largely dissipated. Thus, many people's only realistic chance at a sabbatical is to do an unofficial one by taking some time off between jobs -- but this has its own problems. Since health insurance and many other benefits in the US are tied to employment, it can be extremely costly to not be constantly employed.
- liquidpele 3y ago
  > It is relatively rare for Gen X and Gen Y workers to have stayed with one employer for decades, as many of their parents may have done. I’ve seen more people take them in between jobs than during, which works fine within the job hopping expectations that companies have created.
  - elicash 3y ago
    Yes, "fun-employment" is essentially the new sabbatical.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      You'll probably find that "fun-employment" as a term is mostly used by people who were collecting a very nice paycheck and don't have a lot of serious responsibilities.
wintermutestwin 3y ago
For some reason, hiring culture considers any employment gap as signaling a poor candidate. I’m not sure why, but I wonder if it is that someone who can take a year off work doesn’t have enough debt to make for a captive employee.
- ambicapter 3y ago
  Or those hiring are just suspicious of people who don't make the same mistakes they do.
- bbarn 3y ago
  I think that opinion is changing. I regularly see engineers come in with gaps, and rarely do they not have a good explanation for it that anyone but the worst managers would be ok with. Whether it's child-rearing, testing early retirement, starting their own thing, whatever. About the only thing that would raise a flag for me was "I was in prison" and only because for regulatory reasons in my industry it's not possible to employ convicted felons.
  - neon_electro 3y ago
    Lucky you. 18 months job searching here, 10 years of experience - I absolutely could tell that I was seeing fewer contacts, interviews, offers, etc. in months 7-18 than months 1-6.
zombiwoof 3y ago
if we all did work we loved, we wouldn't need to retire. sadly the world has created a machine that feeds souls to produce profit for the elite to fed grapes.
mcshicks 3y ago
I retired early (age 49), but I took a four month leave of absence about 5 years before that. Trying a leave instead of retiring was one of the few things I read about early retirement that made a lot of sense. I gather some people "miss" work or get bored. I didn't miss it when I took the leave and definitely was not worried about being bored when I did retire. Anyway if you are thinking of early retirement I highly recommend trying to take a leave of absence first. You might have to be willing to quit to make it happen though.
xnx 3y ago
Would love to see parternity/maternity leave for non parents, and normalization of 4 day work weeks.
- sircastor 3y ago
  > Would love to see parternity/maternity leave for non parents Do you mean for an individual supporting a new parent, or something like that? How would it be particularly different than a general family medical leave? (other than getting appropriately paid, which we definitely need)
eole666 3y ago
Or maybe we can go further with a personal qualification salary for everyone, stopping the run for economic growth at all cost before it's too late for our planet (and us) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Qualification_Salary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Qualification_Salar...
- jimbokun 3y ago
  This seems more complex than UBI with no clear advantages.
hollywood_court 3y ago
I’ve been on sabbatical for 18 months now so my son wouldn’t have to go to daycare and so that I could also tackle some large remodeling projects around the house and re-invent myself as a web developer. The value added to my home and the time spent with my son was far more than I would have earned during those 18 months. However, now that I’m ready to go back to work, I’m finding it difficult to land an entry level web development job. We are fine financially but I need to find something with benefits or else I’ll have to keeping spending $1700 per month to insure my family.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > However, now that I’m ready to go back to work, I’m finding it difficult to land an entry level web development job. This is the risk. A year ago you would have been fine, but in this environment you're competing against a lot of people who have been working the entire time. From an interviewer's perspective: I've hired a few people after long gaps with very mixed results. Some people get right back into the job with renewed career vigor. Some people really, really struggle to get back to work after a long break. Some of them aren't interested in anything more than collecting a paycheck and benefits to restore their savings for the next sabbatical, which will occur whenever the company finally gets tired of their non-performance and fires them. That's the risk for employers: It's hard to know the real reason that somebody had a gap on their resume because everyone has a good story to tell in the interview.
  - robryk 3y ago
    What's the difference that you see between people that had a gap and ones that didn't? I would expect an analogous grouping (struggling to continue working without a break, being in the "groove", just being interested in the paycheck) among people without a gap.
    - pc86 3y ago
      I think part of the problem is that very few people have a large gap, or at least very few people are honest about it. It's hard to compare two groups when one of them is N=9997 and the other is N=3.
nullindividual 3y ago
Previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148898
ketzo 3y ago
For individual people, this policy sounds fantastic. For the macroeconomy, this sounds kind of disastrous. A policy that encourages less prime-age employment in a society that is already falling off the demographic cliff [1] seems really bad if your goal is to allow more people to spend more time using government benefits. Poland is already going to struggle to support an aging population, and encouraging 35-year-olds to periodically remove themselves from the workforce feels like it will just accelerate the issue. [1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/poland/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/poland/2020/
- vasco 3y ago
  The point is they'd compensate for working till later. I believe this should be more politically doable than raising retirement age, in agreement with the post. Under your argument all we can do is raise the retirement age to compensate the older demographic.
unbalancedevh 3y ago
I'm not sure that sabbaticals solves the problem, though. The problem, I think, being that people are retiring at the same age but living longer and expecting better, more expensive, health care. Somehow that needs to be paid for. If there's an economic equivalence between the sabbatical I take now versus the extra time I work later (5% interest is assumed in the article), then there's no overall increase in value, is there? I think the benefits of growth are still too biased towards people who already have money. The poor might not be getting poorer, but they're wealth isn't growing at nearly the rate of the rich. Somehow that needs to be evened out so that even the working class see more improvement in their lifestyle in a more natural way.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  I just think this proposal solves a different problem than the one you’re talking about. Presumably it would be designed to be overall revenue neutral, depending on how well future growth can be predicted of course. Whether it’s 3 month’s sabbatical to 1 year retirement, or 2 months to 1 year, or 4 months to 1 year, etc.
Minor49er 3y ago
The working age is typically higher than what's shown on this page. It lists "Work" as age 25-64. 25 is chosen because "Teenager" goes up to 20 instead of 18, and "Studies" go through 24 instead of 22 (roughly considering that about half of the college-aged population attends it [1]). Roughly a third of high schoolers already have jobs [2]. If these students have been working 35 hours per week part time while still in school [3], that could tack on an extra 1.25 years of "work" by the time the students have graduated, assuming they had been working for about 6 years [1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-statistics/ https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-sta... [2] https://www.zippia.com/advice/high-school-job-statistics/ https://www.zippia.com/advice/high-school-job-statistics/ [3] https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles/h/how-many-hours-is-a-part-time-job.aspx#p2 https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...
beardyw 3y ago
> Whether you like to use that time to explore the world, build bonds with your family or brainstorm a new project is up to you. Sadly I think that is an optimistic view. Many will watch daytime TV and get drunk.
- neon_electro 3y ago
  Why is your pessimistic view any more valid or probable?
freetanga 3y ago
At 46, I am taking a one-year Sabbatical and I can assure you it’s refreshing. However, I don’t see most people being able to take one - both financially and mentally. Many people are lifers on a job, and the prospect of being out of their job for 3 months is scary at hell to them. They feel they won’t be able to reconnect with the market. Not everyone in society is the HN crowd, switching jobs for better paying alternatives every few years. On the other hand, even though I had prepared for 12 months in advance having “stuff” to do on day 1 of my sabbatical, I can say the prospect of waking up on day 1 and not having a job to go, can be overwhelming for many after a few weeks. After a few months, you become terrified you are being left behind in the market, even if not the case. I try to learn from this so when retirement hits me in 20 years I can be more prepared for the required mental adjustment. I have seen my parents generation taking a toll on their health by stopping cold turkey and feeling irrelevant in society…
- boredemployee 3y ago
  I've been seeing reports like this daily from people close to me, especially in the tech world. I increasingly feel that we need these breaks, and it leads me to conclude that we've really messed up the work model we've built in society. Perhaps a part-time model would be more humane and mentally sound for a healthier society where people can enjoy their short time on this planet.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  Just popping in to say: me too! I feel like there needs to be a community or forum for people like us. I know at least one other person in my circle doing the same. Seems to be rare but more common than I realized...
tra3 3y ago
I'd like to hear from people that have done sabbaticals or even a longish unpaid time off (say 6 weeks or more). How many times have you done it? How did you manager take it? How did you colleagues react? I'd like to take a few weeks off, unpaid but I'm quite fearful about how the business will react.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  A friend of mine at Intel got a sabbatical after a few years. IIRC, they are the “default” path, at least for engineers, although I don’t know if everybody does it or what. It seems like an awesome perk. A well run company shouldn’t have a big problem if a single engineer vanishes. If management has trouble getting you time for a sabbatical, it would seem you are in a position to ask them for a ton of money.
- Tade0 3y ago
  I did a total of four 3-month sabbaticals - three of them via quitting, one time I got fired and was too burned out to immediately look for a job. The most common reaction was surprise that I don't have anything lined up mixed with only half-joking displays of envy that I have the means to just do nothing for this long(which was somewhat of a headscratcher considering we all had similar salaries). Nevertheless my current employer(or actually middleman, since I'm a contractor) is fine with them as long as they're betweeen projects - I need to notify them two months in advance and can pick up where I left. No guarantee that I'll end up in the same organisation though. I wholeheartedly recommend doing them at least once every three years. Not only you get to focus on other things in life than just work, you can time your job hunt for the hottest moments of the year - typically last months of each quarter except for Q2.
- ghaff 3y ago
  6 weeks is honestly not that much. In a long-ago product management job I took several month long vacations. I planned things around product schedules as best I could. I could probably have added some time with unpaid leave (though I didn't) but it was never an issue. Some colleagues were shocked that I could just go off and do this but no one responsible for actually paying me ever had a problem.
shironandonon_ 3y ago
Mid-40s here. I do contract work and it’s fine. I take 5 or 6 months off every few years and am planning to take a full year off to travel in the next five years. We could die any given day so try to enjoy them.
nathell 3y ago
I’m 39. I’ve taken a 2-month-long sabbatical this year, and it was one of the best things I ever did for myself. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD/AS just before Christmas, after having seen a psychiatrist complaining about chronic fatigue (cf. my Ask HN from two years ago [0]). The medications initially helped, but it was obvious to me that I also needed a substantial amount of rest. So when my company instituted a sabbatical policy soon after, I was first in line to take advantage of it. I split it in two parts. The first one was a long-distance cycle trip that I’d been fantasizing about for years but never had time; I did it this June and thoroughly enjoyed three weeks of exercising my body physically and letting my head rest for a change. After that, July was pretty much a staycation, do-whatever-I-feel-like month. I read books, met friends, played with my pet projects, started learning Rust. I also read more about ADHD and had some key insights which turned into some new habits after I returned to work this month. It might have been my most productive ever, even more so than January after diagnosis. Most importantly, I’ve been maintaining an emotional balance throughout that time; I don’t feel the weariness growing on me anymore. I think all that would be impossible had I not taken the sabbatical. This is just a datapoint, but I highly recommend it if you can afford it. As for the article, I’m not sure what I think about replacing retirement with sabbaticals. The idea is certainly interesting, but to me, while the two can supplant each other, they are not necessarily interchangeable. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768418
pengaru 3y ago
In a world with something UBI-like, sabbaticals are handled by default via the safety net of everyone having a minimum viable income to fallback on.
markus_zhang 3y ago
With the sword of unemployment hanging above my head? No I'll prefer FIRE than this.
pyrophane 3y ago
This only helps if your demographic problems are far in the future, because you need to catch your workers when they are young enough to make this trade. In many places, the cohort they are worried about is already too old for this to work. Also, I would totally expect people to game this system when they get older in order find ways to get out of that extra year or two of work that they promised. Expect a lot of 65 year olds to suddenly develop this or that disability that makes them unable to continue working.
theogravity 3y ago
"After working full-time for at least five years, you can take extended paid leave financed from retirement savings. In return, you voluntarily agree to increase your retirement age. For example, you can take three months extra paid leave while you are 35 by agreeing to increase your retirement age by one year." In the US, it wouldn't fly with a corporation doing this because the expense would be on them. It'd make more sense to revise IRS rules to allow these sabbatical periods (by allowing portioned access to your IRA / 401k with tax rules adjustments) with government-mandated unpaid time off in exchange for retirement age adjustments. I'm not saying I agree with what I've just said, I'm thinking about how corporations and the government would allow playing ball with the exchange idea to begin with. The company my wife works at allows paid sabbaticals (that gives a month / month-half off) after 5 years of employment, and her's will start in a few month. However, there's no guarantee that you still will have your job by the end of it, but because it's sanctioned by the company, I'd imagine there's less of a likelihood that happens.

83 points by matesz 3y ago

I’m 100% on board with this if this means people will be able to actually save for a sabbatical. The reasons why pensions existed to begin with is that workers were pretty poor savers. Then the biggest pension generation voted that it’s pensions for me but not for thee and changed everything to 401k/IRA/Big Mattress and turned it back on the worker to figure out. All while keeping wages down as the world costs increase. One of the best things you can do is live debt free. Even if that means living in an RV or on a boat or tiny house or grandmas basement. Live debt free. Don’t become entangled in needing to work to survive. Living paycheck to paycheck because Bank of Pain needs their flesh.

iso1631 3y ago
> Live debt free. Don’t become entangled in needing to work to survive I don't know about you but with no debt and no income I wouldn't survive very long, as I need annoying things like food.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  I never said don’t work
  - vikramkr 3y ago
    > Don’t become entangled in needing to work to survive If you need to work to get food, you need to work to survive
    - gabereiser 3y ago
      You’re right. So don’t let it get to that point. Work and live below your means. If you are working full time and struggling to put food on the table then take a look at your debt. Work and save so you have 2x more days not working than you do working.
      - vikramkr 3y ago
        Which is fair if you don't like your job or don't get intrinsic satisfaction from making more money/increasing your lifestyle. If you're working full time and struggling to put food on your table, that probably means you're trapped in one of the various poverty traps or financial spirals like healthcare costs that plague this country. These are very hard to get out of and telling ordinary people to just be the kind of extraordinary person who can escape that situation is not just utterly useless but also counterproductive. We point to the folks that have either through extraordinary skill or effort or luck gotten out of those situations and use them to justify perpetuating broken and exploitative systems that trap people in poverty and debt by claiming that clearly people can get out. "Just take a look at your debt" is among the most infuriating things you could say to someone in that situation. Oh it's that easy is it? Just "look at my debt"? Ive gotten enough exposure to the flip side, the lender side, of these stories to see how we (meaning literally the people I went to school with) deliberately engineer these systems to exploit you. You're not just "looking at your debt." You have to escape a system engineered by Yale lawyers and Wharton mbas and internet grifters and psychologists and marketers and financiers and salespeople and mortgage companies and private equity (who owns your land, hi appolo!) and Berkshire Hathaway (who owns your mobile home) and hospital administrator and so so so so many other people
        gabereiser 3y ago
        We are all presented the same choices (granted from different levels of privilege) and we all make decisions. Health care costs are ridiculous, I agree, and people shouldn’t go broke if they get sick. That said, they shouldn’t be eating garbage and things that make them sick. You can’t complain that your finances are drained from cancer all while your whole life you ate Taco Bell and McDonalds. Choices have consequences. Debt is a result of that. There’s really only two maybe three kinds of good debt. Everything else is a salesman trying to get you roped into a payment scheme like you describe. It’s the ultimate bazaar, backed by the lawyers and justice system saying you agreed to pay. Don’t agree to pay for things. Stop buying crap off Facebook. Buy a used car instead of making payments on a new one. Love yourself and stop trying to keep up with the neighbors.
- liquidpele 3y ago
  Have you considered eating the rich?
  - GenerocUsername 3y ago
    Get your iOs-flavored socialism outs here
- Zambyte 3y ago
  You should work on building up savings then.
  - esafak 3y ago
    That's what people spend their entire working lives doing, so they can retire on those savings.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      And this thread is about changing that...
    - iso1631 3y ago
      At a population level that's where rent increases to extract every spare cent from workers. Sure an individual worker can earn more and spend less, but at scale if everyone does that means that the excess money is taken by land owners.
      - gabereiser 3y ago
        It doesn’t have to be this way. It didn’t used to be this way. Rent control helps not just renters but keeps runaway property values from occurring due to renters. Without control to keep the industry from raising rents to 99% of what you can afford, we’ll continue to see what you describe. If I know humanity, it’s that they will always find the next sucker.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  I could feed my family with part-time odd jobs, not a “real job”. Still working, but less and with more freedom. Health insurance and healthcare bills would be what made it impossible, even with no debt.
vasco 3y ago
The idea of the post is based on the fact that this period would be covered by the same social security fund that covers retirements right now in most of social-democratic european systems, so you don't need to save for sabbatical the same way you don't need to save for retirement under these conditions.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  I’m aware, and I’m 100% behind it. It’s the right move. For Poland, for mental health, for invigorating the workforce. I complain about the US system because it’s sooo backwards and it’s what I know. It’s also being used to model other European efforts to eliminate pensions and retirement efforts.
flatline 3y ago
Living debt free feels great, and is a huge privilege. Debt is perhaps the biggest economic driver humans have invented. It gives people leverage they would not otherwise have. College. Small business. Home improvement. Of course there is the downside of usury, payday loans, cc debt, medical debt, inflated education expenses, and all the other troubles caused by debt. But well-chosen debt can be a godsend.
- neon_electro 3y ago
  Especially when it's interest free - thanks, BNPL startups and venture capital! I appreciate interest free loans at your expense.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
>Then the biggest pension generation voted that it’s pensions for me but not for thee and changed everything to 401k/IRA/Big Mattress and turned it back on the worker to figure out. With very low cost target date retirement funds and near free index funds, there is no difference other than cutting out middlemen defined benefit pension fund administrators. All the money is going to the same place, backed by the same federal government. The bigger problem is that while it is easy to vote more money into existence, it is not easy to vote more labor and materials into existence.
pc86 3y ago
Defined-benefit plans do not work. Maybe you can pick out some arbitrary 20/30/40 year window where they did, but with current demographics and projects demographic changes the math just doesn't add up. At least with defined-contribution plans you are able to save for yourself rather than just hoping your retirement fund is still there in 50 years and having to save for yourself on top of that.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >Defined-benefit plans do not work. Or at least they were generally oriented towards multi-decade employment with the government or a large manufacturing company. There were pension fund protections put in place over time and I won't personally regret having a modest payout from a long-ago employer whose pension fund has made it through a couple acquisitions. But defined benefit pensions are another case of tying important benefits to an employer which people shouldn't generally favor, especially today. It's nice having a small lottery ticket I was probably only vaguely aware of at the time but it's not really good policy.

gumby 3y ago

This is excellent reasoning. "Retirement" as it is thought of today, is a fairly recent phenomenon and was originally thought to be quite brief. From my experience long periods scattered through your life is better. I was able to retire in my early 30s and have just engaged in intense multi-year periods of work since, always with gaps of a year or more afterwards. It allowed me to spend more time as a parent, more time with my spouse, and to spend time doing fun activities I will not be able to do in my 70s. I think some professionals will have trouble adapting to this because there will be a strong impetus to "advance their career" rather than take a gap. But encouraging this mode may encourage people to take these gaps, and in fact improve the balance vs today's system in which it's mostly women who have trouble advancing because of time off with the kids.

sojournerc 3y ago
I have had a bit of a forced mid-life (37) retirement for the last 6 months due to being laid off. It's actually been really nice because I'm lucky enough to have enough savings accessable, so it's been a nice low-stress time to recover from working at a start up. What's absurd to me is much of the money I've saved is in a traditional IRA that I reasonably can't touch without penalty until I'm 65 without doing some advanced financial planning like a Roth ladder which requires planning at least 5 years in advance. Hard to plan for being laid off.... My parents died at 68. That they paid social security for their entire careers and got so little is absurd. It's such a shame to me that culturally we emphasize career over life experiences and expect people to wait until their life is ending to enjoy it.
- worrycue 3y ago
  > My parents died at 68. That they paid social security for their entire careers and got so little is absurd. Do their children (i.e. you and your siblings if any) get to access it? If yes, it’s not a complete waste.
  - sojournerc 3y ago
    Nope, my brothers and I inherited their private savings, but no public benefits. My mom received a portion of my father's air force pension after he passed, but not us since we weren't dependents any longer.

jawns 3y ago

I would love to see sabbaticals become more the norm, but I see a few problems with this particular plan and other problems with how they are generally implemented. For this specific plan, it asks a 35-year-old to agree to work an additional year in their 60s for 3 months' sabbatical in their 30s. That's a pretty bad deal, not only because of the imbalance between what you gain and what you sacrifice, but also because there are so many unknowns about your ability to work in your 60s. And how do you really enforce something like that? But in general, one major problem with sabbaticals is that they are almost always tied to your employer and require you to rack up multiple years of experience to qualify for them. But the trend over the past several generations is toward greater job mobility. It is relatively rare for Gen X and Gen Y workers to have stayed with one employer for decades, as many of their parents may have done. Job hopping is often the best way to increase one's compensation, and the loyalty that used to be shown between employers/employees has largely dissipated. Thus, many people's only realistic chance at a sabbatical is to do an unofficial one by taking some time off between jobs -- but this has its own problems. Since health insurance and many other benefits in the US are tied to employment, it can be extremely costly to not be constantly employed.

liquidpele 3y ago
> It is relatively rare for Gen X and Gen Y workers to have stayed with one employer for decades, as many of their parents may have done. I’ve seen more people take them in between jobs than during, which works fine within the job hopping expectations that companies have created.
- elicash 3y ago
  Yes, "fun-employment" is essentially the new sabbatical.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    You'll probably find that "fun-employment" as a term is mostly used by people who were collecting a very nice paycheck and don't have a lot of serious responsibilities.

wintermutestwin 3y ago

For some reason, hiring culture considers any employment gap as signaling a poor candidate. I’m not sure why, but I wonder if it is that someone who can take a year off work doesn’t have enough debt to make for a captive employee.

ambicapter 3y ago
Or those hiring are just suspicious of people who don't make the same mistakes they do.
bbarn 3y ago
I think that opinion is changing. I regularly see engineers come in with gaps, and rarely do they not have a good explanation for it that anyone but the worst managers would be ok with. Whether it's child-rearing, testing early retirement, starting their own thing, whatever. About the only thing that would raise a flag for me was "I was in prison" and only because for regulatory reasons in my industry it's not possible to employ convicted felons.
- neon_electro 3y ago
  Lucky you. 18 months job searching here, 10 years of experience - I absolutely could tell that I was seeing fewer contacts, interviews, offers, etc. in months 7-18 than months 1-6.

zombiwoof 3y ago

if we all did work we loved, we wouldn't need to retire. sadly the world has created a machine that feeds souls to produce profit for the elite to fed grapes.

mcshicks 3y ago

I retired early (age 49), but I took a four month leave of absence about 5 years before that. Trying a leave instead of retiring was one of the few things I read about early retirement that made a lot of sense. I gather some people "miss" work or get bored. I didn't miss it when I took the leave and definitely was not worried about being bored when I did retire. Anyway if you are thinking of early retirement I highly recommend trying to take a leave of absence first. You might have to be willing to quit to make it happen though.

xnx 3y ago

Would love to see parternity/maternity leave for non parents, and normalization of 4 day work weeks.

sircastor 3y ago
> Would love to see parternity/maternity leave for non parents Do you mean for an individual supporting a new parent, or something like that? How would it be particularly different than a general family medical leave? (other than getting appropriately paid, which we definitely need)

eole666 3y ago

Or maybe we can go further with a personal qualification salary for everyone, stopping the run for economic growth at all cost before it's too late for our planet (and us) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Qualification_Salary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Qualification_Salar...

jimbokun 3y ago
This seems more complex than UBI with no clear advantages.

hollywood_court 3y ago

I’ve been on sabbatical for 18 months now so my son wouldn’t have to go to daycare and so that I could also tackle some large remodeling projects around the house and re-invent myself as a web developer. The value added to my home and the time spent with my son was far more than I would have earned during those 18 months. However, now that I’m ready to go back to work, I’m finding it difficult to land an entry level web development job. We are fine financially but I need to find something with benefits or else I’ll have to keeping spending $1700 per month to insure my family.

Aurornis 3y ago
> However, now that I’m ready to go back to work, I’m finding it difficult to land an entry level web development job. This is the risk. A year ago you would have been fine, but in this environment you're competing against a lot of people who have been working the entire time. From an interviewer's perspective: I've hired a few people after long gaps with very mixed results. Some people get right back into the job with renewed career vigor. Some people really, really struggle to get back to work after a long break. Some of them aren't interested in anything more than collecting a paycheck and benefits to restore their savings for the next sabbatical, which will occur whenever the company finally gets tired of their non-performance and fires them. That's the risk for employers: It's hard to know the real reason that somebody had a gap on their resume because everyone has a good story to tell in the interview.
- robryk 3y ago
  What's the difference that you see between people that had a gap and ones that didn't? I would expect an analogous grouping (struggling to continue working without a break, being in the "groove", just being interested in the paycheck) among people without a gap.
  - pc86 3y ago
    I think part of the problem is that very few people have a large gap, or at least very few people are honest about it. It's hard to compare two groups when one of them is N=9997 and the other is N=3.

nullindividual 3y ago

Previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148898

ketzo 3y ago

For individual people, this policy sounds fantastic. For the macroeconomy, this sounds kind of disastrous. A policy that encourages less prime-age employment in a society that is already falling off the demographic cliff [1] seems really bad if your goal is to allow more people to spend more time using government benefits. Poland is already going to struggle to support an aging population, and encouraging 35-year-olds to periodically remove themselves from the workforce feels like it will just accelerate the issue. [1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/poland/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/poland/2020/

vasco 3y ago
The point is they'd compensate for working till later. I believe this should be more politically doable than raising retirement age, in agreement with the post. Under your argument all we can do is raise the retirement age to compensate the older demographic.

unbalancedevh 3y ago

I'm not sure that sabbaticals solves the problem, though. The problem, I think, being that people are retiring at the same age but living longer and expecting better, more expensive, health care. Somehow that needs to be paid for. If there's an economic equivalence between the sabbatical I take now versus the extra time I work later (5% interest is assumed in the article), then there's no overall increase in value, is there? I think the benefits of growth are still too biased towards people who already have money. The poor might not be getting poorer, but they're wealth isn't growing at nearly the rate of the rich. Somehow that needs to be evened out so that even the working class see more improvement in their lifestyle in a more natural way.

jimbokun 3y ago
I just think this proposal solves a different problem than the one you’re talking about. Presumably it would be designed to be overall revenue neutral, depending on how well future growth can be predicted of course. Whether it’s 3 month’s sabbatical to 1 year retirement, or 2 months to 1 year, or 4 months to 1 year, etc.

Minor49er 3y ago

The working age is typically higher than what's shown on this page. It lists "Work" as age 25-64. 25 is chosen because "Teenager" goes up to 20 instead of 18, and "Studies" go through 24 instead of 22 (roughly considering that about half of the college-aged population attends it [1]). Roughly a third of high schoolers already have jobs [2]. If these students have been working 35 hours per week part time while still in school [3], that could tack on an extra 1.25 years of "work" by the time the students have graduated, assuming they had been working for about 6 years [1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-statistics/ https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-sta... [2] https://www.zippia.com/advice/high-school-job-statistics/ https://www.zippia.com/advice/high-school-job-statistics/ [3] https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles/h/how-many-hours-is-a-part-time-job.aspx#p2 https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...

beardyw 3y ago

> Whether you like to use that time to explore the world, build bonds with your family or brainstorm a new project is up to you. Sadly I think that is an optimistic view. Many will watch daytime TV and get drunk.

neon_electro 3y ago
Why is your pessimistic view any more valid or probable?

freetanga 3y ago

At 46, I am taking a one-year Sabbatical and I can assure you it’s refreshing. However, I don’t see most people being able to take one - both financially and mentally. Many people are lifers on a job, and the prospect of being out of their job for 3 months is scary at hell to them. They feel they won’t be able to reconnect with the market. Not everyone in society is the HN crowd, switching jobs for better paying alternatives every few years. On the other hand, even though I had prepared for 12 months in advance having “stuff” to do on day 1 of my sabbatical, I can say the prospect of waking up on day 1 and not having a job to go, can be overwhelming for many after a few weeks. After a few months, you become terrified you are being left behind in the market, even if not the case. I try to learn from this so when retirement hits me in 20 years I can be more prepared for the required mental adjustment. I have seen my parents generation taking a toll on their health by stopping cold turkey and feeling irrelevant in society…

boredemployee 3y ago
I've been seeing reports like this daily from people close to me, especially in the tech world. I increasingly feel that we need these breaks, and it leads me to conclude that we've really messed up the work model we've built in society. Perhaps a part-time model would be more humane and mentally sound for a healthier society where people can enjoy their short time on this planet.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
Just popping in to say: me too! I feel like there needs to be a community or forum for people like us. I know at least one other person in my circle doing the same. Seems to be rare but more common than I realized...

tra3 3y ago

I'd like to hear from people that have done sabbaticals or even a longish unpaid time off (say 6 weeks or more). How many times have you done it? How did you manager take it? How did you colleagues react? I'd like to take a few weeks off, unpaid but I'm quite fearful about how the business will react.

bee_rider 3y ago
A friend of mine at Intel got a sabbatical after a few years. IIRC, they are the “default” path, at least for engineers, although I don’t know if everybody does it or what. It seems like an awesome perk. A well run company shouldn’t have a big problem if a single engineer vanishes. If management has trouble getting you time for a sabbatical, it would seem you are in a position to ask them for a ton of money.
Tade0 3y ago
I did a total of four 3-month sabbaticals - three of them via quitting, one time I got fired and was too burned out to immediately look for a job. The most common reaction was surprise that I don't have anything lined up mixed with only half-joking displays of envy that I have the means to just do nothing for this long(which was somewhat of a headscratcher considering we all had similar salaries). Nevertheless my current employer(or actually middleman, since I'm a contractor) is fine with them as long as they're betweeen projects - I need to notify them two months in advance and can pick up where I left. No guarantee that I'll end up in the same organisation though. I wholeheartedly recommend doing them at least once every three years. Not only you get to focus on other things in life than just work, you can time your job hunt for the hottest moments of the year - typically last months of each quarter except for Q2.
ghaff 3y ago
6 weeks is honestly not that much. In a long-ago product management job I took several month long vacations. I planned things around product schedules as best I could. I could probably have added some time with unpaid leave (though I didn't) but it was never an issue. Some colleagues were shocked that I could just go off and do this but no one responsible for actually paying me ever had a problem.

shironandonon_ 3y ago

Mid-40s here. I do contract work and it’s fine. I take 5 or 6 months off every few years and am planning to take a full year off to travel in the next five years. We could die any given day so try to enjoy them.

nathell 3y ago

I’m 39. I’ve taken a 2-month-long sabbatical this year, and it was one of the best things I ever did for myself. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD/AS just before Christmas, after having seen a psychiatrist complaining about chronic fatigue (cf. my Ask HN from two years ago [0]). The medications initially helped, but it was obvious to me that I also needed a substantial amount of rest. So when my company instituted a sabbatical policy soon after, I was first in line to take advantage of it. I split it in two parts. The first one was a long-distance cycle trip that I’d been fantasizing about for years but never had time; I did it this June and thoroughly enjoyed three weeks of exercising my body physically and letting my head rest for a change. After that, July was pretty much a staycation, do-whatever-I-feel-like month. I read books, met friends, played with my pet projects, started learning Rust. I also read more about ADHD and had some key insights which turned into some new habits after I returned to work this month. It might have been my most productive ever, even more so than January after diagnosis. Most importantly, I’ve been maintaining an emotional balance throughout that time; I don’t feel the weariness growing on me anymore. I think all that would be impossible had I not taken the sabbatical. This is just a datapoint, but I highly recommend it if you can afford it. As for the article, I’m not sure what I think about replacing retirement with sabbaticals. The idea is certainly interesting, but to me, while the two can supplant each other, they are not necessarily interchangeable. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768418

pengaru 3y ago

In a world with something UBI-like, sabbaticals are handled by default via the safety net of everyone having a minimum viable income to fallback on.

markus_zhang 3y ago

With the sword of unemployment hanging above my head? No I'll prefer FIRE than this.

pyrophane 3y ago

This only helps if your demographic problems are far in the future, because you need to catch your workers when they are young enough to make this trade. In many places, the cohort they are worried about is already too old for this to work. Also, I would totally expect people to game this system when they get older in order find ways to get out of that extra year or two of work that they promised. Expect a lot of 65 year olds to suddenly develop this or that disability that makes them unable to continue working.

theogravity 3y ago

"After working full-time for at least five years, you can take extended paid leave financed from retirement savings. In return, you voluntarily agree to increase your retirement age. For example, you can take three months extra paid leave while you are 35 by agreeing to increase your retirement age by one year." In the US, it wouldn't fly with a corporation doing this because the expense would be on them. It'd make more sense to revise IRS rules to allow these sabbatical periods (by allowing portioned access to your IRA / 401k with tax rules adjustments) with government-mandated unpaid time off in exchange for retirement age adjustments. I'm not saying I agree with what I've just said, I'm thinking about how corporations and the government would allow playing ball with the exchange idea to begin with. The company my wife works at allows paid sabbaticals (that gives a month / month-half off) after 5 years of employment, and her's will start in a few month. However, there's no guarantee that you still will have your job by the end of it, but because it's sanctioned by the company, I'd imagine there's less of a likelihood that happens.