Time off for time off
In the fall of 2009, Karen Marzocco began a year-long adventure. She spent Christmas in Buenos Aires, travelled by ship to Antarctica, snorkelled with penguins in the Galapagos Islands, and spent hours as a volunteer watching over whales and counting sea lions in her home province of British Columbia. And that’s just the quick version. “I did things I never thought I could do and made connections with other people and with the environment,” says the 44-year-old. “As you get older, it’s easy to forget you can still grow — this year was a reminder.”
Marzocco’s year off work happened thanks to a sabbatical-leave program offered by her employer, the CBC. The news operations manager lived on 75 per cent of her salary for four years in order to take the fifth year off with pay. Furthermore, she saved a substantial sum to cover transportation and accommodation for the seven months she was either travelling or living away from home. It required a little scrimping, she acknowledges, “but I’d do it again in a second. It was the most incredible time of my life.”
A goal within reach
That gift of time away from the everyday grind is something a growing number of mid-career Canadians covet. And yet most of us only dream of taking a sabbatical leave. Vancouver author Cathy Osborne wrote her book, Get a Life! The Essential Guide to Taking Time Off to Fulfill Your Dreams, after her second round-the-world trip because so many people asked how she and her husband, Bill, managed to do it. “They couldn’t grasp that it was possible,” says Osborne, 50. “They always assumed we had earned or inherited huge amounts of money.”
But Osborne insists taking a break from work to pursue personal goals such as travel, study or simply spend time with family is within reach for many Canadians — even those who don’t have access to a leave program through work — as long as they choose to make it a priority.
So how do you find a way to fund an extended period of time off and ensure you still have a job when you return? Read on for our four-step guide to getting the break you crave.
Step one. Draw up a financial plan
You need to come up with a time and cost estimate. According to Vancouver certified financial planner Diane McCurdy, if you want to travel, you need to factor in not only airfare and other transportation, lodging, meals and entertainment, but also healthcare insurance and even cellphone plans.Marzocco used itineraries from several tour operators to plot a route, then researched individual costs. “I really had no idea how much time it would take to get from one place to another,” she says, “so I looked at travel brochures to see how many days it took tour companies to cover a certain area to determine if I wanted to do something similar.” Once she figured out where she was going, she went online to research the cost of hotel rooms and public transportation.
Your initial research may even change the shape of your plans, according to 53-year-old Janice Waugh of Toronto, who took a 10-month trip with her family in 2001. Although Waugh’s excursion was partly funded by the sale of the trade show company she and her husband owned, “we certainly didn’t want to spend all our money — we had to think about retirement,” she says. The couple had originally intended to travel for a year, but “when we looked into it, we discovered renting a van for 10 months in the off-season [September to June] was about equal to renting it for one month in the summer. So we cut our trip back by two months.”
Waugh’s budget calculations included tuition for a semester at a Swiss school for one son, an apartment for five months in Switzerland and a Volkswagen pop-up for the duration of the trip. Not only would the VW provide transportation, it could sleep up to three people comfortably and had a small, fully equipped kitchen. “That meant we wouldn’t be eating out as much.” Waugh and her family rented out their home while they were gone, which served the dual purpose of bringing in some income and eliminating the need to have someone check on the house regularly.
While the Osbornes tried to stick to a daily stipend on their leaves, Waugh and her family set a monthly budget. Whether you calculate your expenses on a daily or monthly basis doesn’t much matter, suggests McCurdy, as long as you budget appropriately.
