Non-Traditional Retirements, or DIY Sabbaticals
NPR Morning Edition featured a story today about non-traditional retirements: Seeing The (Northern) Light: A Temporary Arctic Retirement. Instead of waiting until 65, Winston Chen decided to stop working for an entire year mid-career and moved his family to a small Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle with only 180 residents.
The whole family got to do many things they’d never do otherwise. Financially, they offset their mortgage by renting out their Boston home completely as-is for a year to another family on a temporary work assignment. His wife Kristin was able to get a job teaching elementary school in Norway for a year, as it was a remote area that needed teachers. They could keep expenses low as the tiny village had no need for a car, no malls, and no restaurants. One of his pursuits ended up being an iPhone app that took off and now supports their entire family, although that wasn’t the goal.
The inspiration came from the TEDtalk “The power of time off” by designer Stefan Sagmeister. Here’s a screenshot (sorry for the poor quality) illustrating the traditional working timeline: learn for 25 years, work for 40 years, then retire for 25 years.
A commenter pointed out that this shows that our society seems to feel that education is for the young, work is for the middle-aged, and leisure is for the elderly. But what if you decided to snip 5 years from those retirement years and sprinkle them between your working years? This is essentially the idea of sabbaticals, usually associated with tenured professors taking a paid year off from their usual teaching and research duties. Every 7 years, Sagmeister completely shuts down his popular design shop for an entire year.
Both Sagmeister and Winston Chen add that if you do this, you shouldn’t just give yourself a year of nothing and expect to figure it out along the way. At the minimum, you should make a list of all the things that you want to try and/or accomplish (Chen’s included oil painting, photography, reading, learning Norwegian, and learning how to play the ukulele). Both broke it down into a daily schedule as well (Chen’s is below).
Read the rest of this entry…By Jonathan Ping | Inspirational, Retirement | 5/20 | 1 Comment »
The Georgia Institute of Technology and Udacity.com are partnering together to offer an accredited master of science degree in computer science (
Much of the discussion around The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) aka Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare has been about politics. But it’s the law, it’s constitutional, and a lot of things are happening soon. For most full-time workers that wish to keep their employer-provided health insurance, little will change. However, things will be very different for the self-employed, unemployed, uninsured, and those seeking semi-retirement or retirement before age 65 and Medicare. You can use it even if you already have employer-provided insurance, although you may become ineligible for certain tax credits. There’s way too much information to cover everything, but here’s my summary of the developments.
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