Micro-retirement

Only works if you are not working a shitty job and living paycheck to paycheck. Good fucking luck in most economies greedy billionaires are keeping this from happening.
- Yeah wtf jobs is she getting where she builds up a safety net in 1-2 years? I've been at this shit for a decade and have 3 digits in my bank account
  Edit: I should disclose the fact that I have been making minimum wage this whole time. That said, most people I know make nearly average wages, and still have 3-4 digits in their bank accounts at all times
  
  Living with parents probably (/gen, non-derogatory)
  
  I mean almost anyone with a stem education is able to do this.
  Before you say: "buh have you seen the job market?"
  The point of the plan isn't to get stinking rich off of each 1-2 year stint, it's to make just enough money that you can travel around and reset to nearly 0 after not working for a few months to a year
  
  Live with a group in a LCOL area, eat rice and beans, no other hobbies.
- I mean, I don't see how it's possible if you're only going to have entry level skills... You're not really building up a wealth of marketable skills if you quit all the jobs after a year.
  
  It works if you can build up the relationships and reputation, which will depend heavily on the industry and the job.
  I know two people who do this, and they have jobs that allow them to.
  One is an emergency room physician. His shifts are staffed through a middleman at 3 different local hospitals, and the nature of the work is that he just does work during the shift and doesn't bring any home with him or continuing onto the next shift he works. He gets paid very well when he's working (average annual salary of an emergency physician in the U.S. is about $375,000 per year). And occasionally just lines up a long sabbatical, does volunteer work overseas (Doctors Without Borders/MSF), and takes time off for himself and his family. He basically budgets a $200k lifestyle and takes unpaid time off. But his pathway basically required him to just dominate school, from kindergarten through a bachelor's degree and 4 years of medical school, and then put in his time as a resident.
  Another friend of mine works as an electrician and lighting crew member on TV shows and movies. He always has to line up his next project after the current one ends, but occasionally can line something up in the future so that he can take a calculated 3-6 months between projects. He's got a good working relationship with some producers and directors, so he basically knows he can find a job anytime with whatever production those people happen to be working on. Whenever he has enough cash, he can go and travel, timed out to where he's not paying rent for an unoccupied apartment. Then he lines up another gig, signs a new lease, and then continues working. I think he lives very frugally on the job (I think stuff like food is covered when filming on location, so not a lot of out of pocket expenses for food/drink while working), and saves money that way.
  With that, I think there are a few opportunities to think through which careers might actually allow for this.
  Project-based jobs, where people work for a few months or a year towards a particular project completion, might be good for intentionally taking gaps between projects. I wonder if construction and similar industries would allow for this. Academia often has formal sabbatical policies, too, but that's relatively late career.
  Personal independent gigs can do this, if you can earn enough money doing it (so, like, not Uber and Doordash). Some people do contract design work, create independent art, write essays and op eds for different publications, etc. If you're paid by the job, taking a break doesn't really hurt your "resume," so to speak. Even some who are expected to publish on a defined schedule can get ahead of the curve by producing a bunch of work for publication on that schedule (some webcomic authors and social media influencers are known to do this).
  Jobs where you are employed by some firm but actually work for a client that hired your firm might also be a good candidate, if you have the seniority and flexibility and credibility to just take unpaid time off while still being on the books and website as an employee. I know people who took off a year of parental leave as lawyers, but it really depends on practice area and firm culture whether that will permanently hold them back on career growth.
  Jobs that are basically shift work are designed so that no one person is totally indispensable or non replaceable, which gives the worker the flexibility to leave without hard feelings, and come back whenever they're ready. My emergency medicine friend probably fits in this category. But also, maybe any kind of 24/7 coverage job sorta fits this category, too, in health care, IT, critical infrastructure, etc.
- Yeah and if the job market sucks and you’re out a job

This only works without kids.
- I mean there’s a whole bunch of assumptions
  First, you’d need to make enough money to work 1-2 years to be able to save up enough that it’s more substantial than a two week vacation, which for many isn’t possible.
  Second, you’d need to have a type of career where it’s just fine to stop working for awhile and then come back like nothing happened. Most careers don’t let you just leave for awhile and come back when you feel like it, and applying for a new job every year or two years sounds fucking miserable.
  Third, you’d need to have some place you can live during those 1-2 years you are working. Either you’re rich enough to just already own a home or condo or keep paying rent, or you have kind friends or family that let you live with them. Otherwise, again, you’re searching for housing every year or two, which sounds awful.
  Fourth, you still need medical care when you aren’t working, so you need the money to pay for private insurance.
  As you said. Pets, kids, an SO with a stable job that doesn’t want to do this, all non-starters.
  To me this screams “I have a trust fund and I mean that I want to save up travel money while my apartment is already paid for.” And where that’s not the case, I imagine it’s someone in a very lucrative field, where working two years nets them a significant amount of money.
  Though the top comment certainly shows an example of where this does work (though it requires all the assumptions I outlined above)
  
  My friends and I basically do this. None of us have trust funds.
  My friends:
  Park ranger, climbing guide, liftee, etc. Do enjoyable seasonal work, take off seasons you wanna have fun.
  Remote worker. Live in a van, work normal hours, but travel where ever you feel like.
  Rope access technician. Make 6 figures in 6 months, winters off.
  Engineer/Software Dev/Normal Office Worker. Do good work at a no-name mid-sized company for a few years to build up good working relationships and tribal knowledge. Leave on good terms with a handshake agreement that you can return in a few years as long as they still have room for you. Call it a "sabbatical".
  Contractor/Carpenter/Trades. Make 6 figures in 6 months, or just take off whenever you want. Someone always needs a staircase built.
  Accountant. Work 3 months for tax season, then fuck off.
  Travel Nursing. Pick up 3 months stints basically whenever you want.
  Teacher. Summers off.
  Nannying. Build up a string of good references, then take off when you feel like it - you can always find another gig.
  Any job where you can make around 6 figures after a few years in the trenches. Live cheap, save up, invest in passive income streams, retire forever.
  Some of them have pets. Some of them have kids. Some of them have partners (who they chose in part for their openness to this lifestyle). Some of my friends were born into stable middle class families. Some were born into poverty with drug addicts. Some were drug addicts who spent years in and out of jail. Literally the only thing they all have in common is that they cared enough about having flexibility in their lives to make it happen.
  Edit: for additional context -
  Where do they live? They tend to live in their cars or in tents in nature, or else in hostel-like environments when abroad. No rent helps a lot. They will rent out their homes when they are gone if they own. Or sublease their rental if they want it when they come back. Or simply have no home base other than maybe a storage unit. Not owning much, and having little attachment to material possessions helps a lot here, too.
  For healthcare - best option is to be from somewhere with a good healthcare system. Lots of my friends are Canadian. I'm from Colorado, and the state subsidizes your health insurance premiums based on your income. You can also use travel insurance, and set your home address to be somewhere where you don't intend to go near, like a parent or friends home. Or you can simply spend all your time in countries where healthcare is cheap or free. Finally, one friend was simply uninsured and said his plan was to throw his wallet out the window on his way to the ER and give them a fake name and address.
- My buddy does this with 3 kids. Hes been a contractor all his life for start up. Regularly gets equity in the start up. Builds it up, then cashes out.
  Works for him as a contractor because he can make his own hours and they home school their kids, so they travel all the time too
  
  Those kids are going to be miles behind everyone else when they enter the workforce.

I've got a buddy who does a variation of this. He's got a little shack pretty close to town. He'll work in the oil field for a few months, come hang out with everyone, and live a "normal" life. Then when he's saved up enough he rolls out and lives in the woods with his dog hunting and fishing and growing veggies. We go by and check on his place every so often to make sure no one has broken in and it's not rotting to the ground.
When he no longer has the money to stay in the woods he comes back. I say that, but he's got the skills to feed himself out there. I think he gets bored after a year or two and wants to be around people for a while.
I asked him about retirement once and he's got another shack right on a lake that's been paid off since the 90s. His plan is to go there and fish and not come back.

I thought Gen Z aren't really into drinking or drugs. I hope they do this. Make holes in your resume the norm so they can't hold anything against you. I have friends that did/do this and they got it out of their system. They're pretty happy with their lives.
- From what I've seen as a gen-z/millennial aged outgoing person: older gen-z still drinks quite a lot, younger ones (17-22) drink less but use significantly more drugs.
  But that's just my two cents. Drugs do seem to have normalised a significant amount. Most nightlife people are clearly using coke, mdma or designer stuff, which used to be more subtle.

Tried something like this. Recruiters told me the gap didn't look good and I should lie about needing that time off for my mental health. The 1st class honours degree I was told would allow me to walk into a job was deemed essentially worthless since I had only around 2 year's industry experience. Took me months to get another role offered - a 15k paycut and overall a major downgrade - which I had to take to pay the rent. 0/10, would not recommend.
- the gap didn’t look good
  Yeah, live your entire fucking life to be attractive to that guy.
  The only thing worth learning from this is that if there's so little need for work to be done that "having gaps in the resume" is enough that they'd rather go without, then the work does not need to be done.
  It's beyond time for UBI.
- Yeah.... I don't really think anyone really cares about anyone's education anymore, at least not past your first employer.
  I have to spend a lot of time teaching people in their residencies at my job, and where they went school doesn't really bring anything to the table. In fact, a lot of the people who went to fancy private medical schools were either overwhelmed by having to talk to our impoverished patient population, or didn't ever develop healthy ways to mitigate interpersonal conflict.
- I think the problem might be how quickly you quit to do it. It takes a good year to train a new person to be productive. If they only get about a year of productivity from you after training you for a year (and a junior level amount of productivity at that), then it's not worth their time and effort to invest in you. If you did it every 5-7 years instead, it would probably go over better. That's long enough to see whole projects through to completion and then just take a break in between.
  There's also the issue of how long you take off. If you take off 6 months to a year, it's less likely that new technology comes in and changes everything than if you take off 2 years. Ex: 2 years from today you can expect huge searches of industries to adopt using AI tools in day-to-day tasks. Another ex: I'm an engineer, not a CS person. I've helped design computer systems, but sophisticated coding isn't the main part of my job. In the last 3ish years I've seen every system I've encountered switch to containerization.

Healthcare costs in the US is usually the blocker for me when I think about extended stays as a hermit.
- One solution to this has been, be a resident of a blue state and get on medicaid, though it's looking like that might not be viable going forward...
- Go somewhere with cheap healthcare when not working

Boomer here - that's pretty much how I managed my software career. Do a contract job for 6 mos to a year, then do theatre until I needed to work again. Had to go back to fulltime work once I got married and had kids. I miss those days tho. Also, fuck your tiny stereotyping brain if you think a whole generation has the same likes and dislikes.
- Man I love you! (Platonically, of course).

This is a Gen X thing but whatever
- Who do you think raised Gen Z?

She thinks the jobs will be waiting for her. That’s adorable.

If you're ever on the backpacking circuit you'll meet people like that. They work just long enough to save up for their next trip.
- But also, they travel frugally, not having a luxurious lifestyle between earning higher than average wage.

"Sounds like we're paying these guys too much"

Im already doing this, can recommend
- Millennial here and I've been doing this my entire adult life. If companies had better vacation policies and a less boring work flow, I'd be less compelled to job hop every year or two.
  
  They ever ask you about your repetitive gap on your resume?

I work in a place where they had specific arrangements for that.
It was something like after 5 years of employment there you could take a year off and come back to the same position you left.
- Similar at my previous job, get paid 75% of your regular salary for 5 years and they would keep your position on hold for one year of paid vacation where you would get paid whatever they didn't pay you all this time.
- That's kinda cool, really

I’ve done this for the past several years. Not on purpose. I keep telling myself I’ll settle down.
I got a new job a year ago. It looked promising and I was ready to make a life here. But I don’t see myself in it. Leaving soon. Saved enough for modest living and adventurous cheapish traveling for at least a year.
Before that job I was mostly on the road for a year and a half, with some temporary odd jobs here and there.
It has its pros and cons. It’s exciting and adventurous. Sometimes it’s intense. I basically have no retirement savings. Super hard to find a partner.
- You must have a pretty well-paying job because most jobs don't pay enough for you to really generate anything other than very mediocre savings.
  If I were to try this I'd probably last about 4 months and then run out of money.
  
  Not really, actually. I live somewhat frugally. And when I say “travel” I usually mean very low cost traveling involving lots of camping.

Bad idea because
Jobs hiring will complain about the gaps in your resume
when you are too old to work anymore you will have nothing
- My 401k is being destroyed by an orange idiot who's literally enjoyed entitlement his entire life. When I'm too old to work, I'll just die.
  
  Are you paying attention to your 401k? S&P is up ytd. If youre actively paying attention to your 401k, yours should be doing even better than that.
  I dont care what side of the political aisle youre on, but your retirement 401k shouldn't be being deatroyed right now
- Not if you're a freelancer. I know some people who've been doing that for years, no issues getting a new gig.
  Then you retire.
- Be good enough to get hired and maintain industry connections. Have various skills sets you can use to get hired in various fields. Taking time off to travel is high status, and many companies won't blink if that is your reason.
  Max out your 401k first. Retire to Thailand.

A woman I know did just that, except she wrote a book during her "off" years.

A woman I know worked as an escort on and off and spent most of her time traveling, but I don't think most people have the looks and the charisma to do that even if they want to. I'm not sure what other careers both pay enough and let you quit and then start again easily, but presumably there are some.
- Just read this thread. There are a million ways to do it. You just have to want it.

I wish. It takes me around 6 months and hundreds of applications to get a job. That strategy isn't sustainable for me.

So just longer “camp” work? Some people work for 3 months and get a month off.
I knew a landscaper who would work for the 6 months you can and then all winter would go and stay on the mountains. The company he worked for only needed to keep a couple guys for snow clearing, so it worked perfectly.

I did one cycle of it, but now I'm too burnt out and despaired and in need of medical care to think of going back to any form of employment and I'm really lucky that I dont have to worry about it too much

Didn’t know this phenomenon had a name. That’s what I’m doing right now however. I want to have enough money to be unemployed for a year or two.

if you're a native English speaker, you can start doing this next week.
every month you teach english generally results in 2 to 3 months of savings.
- My friend spent a few years in Taiwan and Thailand this way, no need to be a teacher by trade either.
  
  it's a great job.
  teach as little or much as you want, save as much money as you want, go pretty much wherever you want, and then chill out the rest of the time.
  I taught for several years and am still traveling on the savings a decade later.

Nothing new.

This gets a lot easier if you have somewhere reliable and preferably free to stay when you need to start working again. Even if you have paid off your own place or been given a place for free you have bills to pay on it. I guess you can rent it out while you are away, but that seems less than ideal to me as how do you keep it maintained if you aren't in the country? It just ends up being another cost.
I would have loved to have done this but the housing situation has always put me off.

Honey, that was a lifestyle boomers actually lived once. Though it's more of a silent generation lifestyle

This is literally the route I took in my life. Entered the workforce in the early 2000s in IT as helpdesk. Worked till I had a resume good enough for the next level up. Lived below my means. Take several months off to do whatever. Apply for a higher level position. Rinse and repeat every couple years until I was in my 40s at a company I intend to retire with.
I always lived in a smaller place than what I could afford. Never owned a new car. My current vehicle is a 2001 pickup truck, purchased in like 2018. So, gotta trade one luxury for another.
2 caveats: IT as a career was not in the state its in now. Much easier to move up and around. I'm also now in my late 40s and looking to buy my first home, since I wasn't building a nest egg my whole life, and that's no fun.
Also, it was really important to have some significant achievements on the resume as I left each place to show growth professionally so I could always jump up in role/salary with each move.
My career is solid and I make a great salary for my age, but homes are just insane. My brother is 6 years younger and took a more traditional route and started a family, he was able to score a good home before COVID.
Still, I wouldn't trade anything material for the life I took and the places I went.

This is what my old housemate did, starting in the 90s. Worked out quite well for him. My dad used went round the world with the navy in the 50s and used to talk about how some other cultures did stuff like this.

I kinda love it and kinda hate it

How does that work when you don't live with your parents?
Rents are extremely expensive and would slow down the "build a safety net" part of the cycle.
- Live with roommates, stop living with roommates since you're now traveling, no rent payment.

As someone with kids, that's not happening. Then again, my sibling did this and went on a year-long trip with their kids, and it worked out for them.

If you're gonna do this, go drive a truck in a mining area. (In Australia this basically means WA) They're often desperate for drivers and the pay is insane.

[off topic]
I am a fan of the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald. Introduced to them in childhood and still worth a re-read.
Travis was a 'salvage consultant' who would rob loot back from criminals, and then retire for as long as the money lasted.
- What's funny is I just typed a comment trying to analyze what types of jobs would allow for this, and one category was the "discrete projects that have a defined beginning and end" type jobs, and it did cross my mind that movie-style heists tend to have this kind of arrangement.

There's a sea shanty to that effect.

Boomers were trying to ruin it for us.