The Mini-Retirement Playbook with Jillian Johnsrud

Your Next Dollar: Money Management for High Earners

This episode explores the concept of 'mini-retirements,' which are intentional, extended career breaks designed to pursue personal goals without

Key takeaways

• Mini-retirements differ from vacations primarily through their duration and intention to pursue deeper goals.
• Limiting mini-retirement goals to three prevents burnout and ensures that pursuits don't conflict with each other.

Main topics

• Mini-retirement strategies
• Career break negotiation

Notable quotes

You can have a long career... But you could also take these little chunks of time, a month, three months, six months, a year, and do these amazing adventures.

Conclusion

Mini-retirements offer a practical framework for pursuing life's passi

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) We talk about employee equity all the time on this show, and done right, it can seriously help build your wealth. Done wrong, and you can end up with way too much riding on one stock, or a tax bill that catches you completely off guard. NerdWallet Wealth Partners CEO and Your Next Dollar co-host Ryan Sterling is hosting a free webinar all about employee equity. He is breaking down the top equity topics that they talk about with their clients every single week. like when to sell versus when to hold and expensive mistakes to avoid. Plus, we'll have a live Q &A at the end. So if you've been wanting to ask Ryan a question, this is your shot. Now, this isn't some 90-minute boring webinar. We're condensing this down to 30 minutes so you can get all the information in on your lunch break. The next webinar is October 15th. Click the link in the description to grab your spot. Speaker 1 (0:53) So what if you didn't have to wait 40 years to retire? Today, we're talking about mini-retirements and how to take real breaks from your career without wrecking your money or your resume. Speaker 1 (1:09) This is Your Next Dollar by NerdWallet Wealth Partners. And today, my guest is Jillian Johnsrud. She's the author of Retire Often. She is the host of the Retire Often podcast, and she's taken more than a dozen mini retirements herself. And she's used to lived abroad, traveled to 27 countries, and raising six kids. And Jillian, from what I understand, you may be taking another mini retirement coming up as well. So Jillian, welcome to Your Next Dollar. Thank Speaker 2 (1:36) you so much for having me. Speaker 1 (1:38) I'm really excited to have you here because I think many retirements are on a lot of folks' minds. I mean, I think many people don't realize that this is something that they can do and this is something that, you know, moving forward, they can start to think through and plan out. And I think this is just a really, really cool thing that you have talked about time and time again. And so as we dive deep into this, I want to kind of talk through, hey, what is your background? How did you kind of start thinking through early retirements? And where did this idea even come from? Speaker 2 (2:05) Yeah, I never, I never expected to be able to retire early. You know, I kind of went into like, I had been just, we had a bunch of debt, we weren't going to make a ton of money. And so the idea of like, oh, we could retire at 40 or 50 seemed preposterous. But I also had all these dreams. I had all these goals. Like I wanted to travel. I wanted to do all these things. Like I wanted to kind of like that Mary Oliver, what's my, your one wild and precious life. I wanted to lean into that. And so. And mini retirement was a really amazing tool, it seemed, to where maybe you could have a little bit of both. You can have a long career. You can have kind of a traditional life and trajectory. But you could also take these little chunks of time, a month, three months, six months, a year, and do these amazing adventures and kind of live out these other values and dreams. Speaker 1 (2:56) And that's one of the beautiful realities is many people feel as though, you know. they are trapped in doing a job that maybe they enjoy, maybe they actually like their job, but over the course of the long term, they're like, I don't know if I can do this over the course of the next 30 years. And this gives you an option. And what I love about personal finance is once you figure out flexibility and you figure out that there are options out there, all of a sudden this light bulb moment goes off and you realize, oh, I'm not stuck. There are some cool things that I can do. I can utilize my free will and I have the ability to be able to plan some of this stuff out. Now, I know one big question a lot of people think through is what's the between something like a mini retirement versus something like a long vacation or a sabbatical? Yeah, Speaker 2 (3:36) there's a lot of different terms for mini retirement. Some people call it a career break, a gap year, a sabbatical, you know, a hiatus. Like, whatever term resonates. I think the biggest distinction between that larger chunk of time and a long vacation is usually kind of the duration, but also the intention. For most people of occasion, it's a ton of work to prepare for, but then you're trying to do all the things in seven days or 10 days or 14 days, and it can be stressful. It can be overwhelming and could be super expensive. One of the things that's surprising to a lot of people is when you actually take longer chunks of time, it becomes a lot more affordable. You know, three months in Europe isn't tremendously more expensive than a really nice 10 days in Paris. And so, but you come back rested, you come back refreshed, you have time to slow travel, you have more time for friends and family while you're traveling. You get a lot more benefits. And you come back in a different headspace. Speaker 1 (4:44) I love that. And I think for many folks out there, you know, you think about travel and ways that you can travel. And I've taken, you know, many times the quick trip over to Europe, for example, and you go for, you know, seven days, you go for nine days, 10 days, and all of Speaker 2 (4:59) a Speaker 1 (4:59) sudden you come back and you feel as though maybe I'm not as rested as I thought I would be because I was kind of rushing to the airport to get all these travel days. All of a sudden you finally kind of decompress and then you have to go back again. And that's one of the beautiful things I think about, you know, having the opportunity. optionality for something like a mini retirement is you get to fully decompress and you get to have the ability to really see if this is something that you enjoy doing. I think some people out there also just kind of think through retirement and they feel as though, you know, I got to figure out, you know, I'm just going to lay on a beach and I'm going to kind of do nothing all day, but you really got to figure out how to fill in your time. And this kind of gives you a great way to figure out what you love and some of the things that you like to do so that you can plan out some of the things that you enjoy for the rest of your life, which I think is really neat. And one of the mistakes I think I've heard you talk about is people, you know, should kind of think through what they're going to do during their mini retirement, how they're going to actually spend their time, and they're going to put some goals into place. So you talk about setting up, you know, three different goals for your mini retirement. Why is it three and not just trying to do everything all at once? A Speaker 2 (6:01) lot of people for their first mini retirement, they've been working a long time. They might have been 10, 15 consecutive years, and they've got this like bucket list. They're behind in like 97 different areas of life. And they think, oh my gosh, a month, three months, that's so much time. I'm going to do all the things. But a lot of those goals are a little bit competing. If they're like, man, I'm massively burned out. I'm so tired. I haven't had any time with friends and family. I really want to travel. I want to start this hobby. I want to start a business. Like I have all these pursuits. Well, if you're really burned out and start a business, they actually don't go together that well. Or like I'm going to travel all the time, but I also want more quality time with my friends and family. Well, if you're gone the whole time. And so sometimes what can happen is nothing feels fully fulfilled. fully satisfied like i actually did the thing i wanted to do and so there is a huge temptation to do all the things because you're so behind on all these things and you want to catch up on all these things but really i think about right now in this season what's the most urgent like what's the thing you need the most and what's like the most valuable for you right now and hoping you know my book's called retire often not take like one massive epic mini retirement and then you're done pick three for this one knowing that maybe in two years in five years you're gonna do another one so you can save some of these things for the next one Speaker 1 (7:37) Absolutely. I love that. And I think, you know, I think about seasons of life that I go through, for example, where there were, you know, seasons of life where I was really into like different fitness activities. So I'm just thinking through, like, for example, you know, one time I was into really into running and doing a lot of different running activities. Then I got into pickleball and that was like one thing I really wanted to do a lot. I felt as though I wanted to spend all my time doing some of these different things. And I think that this would be a really cool way to really explore some of those ideas. Maybe you're you want to write a book or you want to do. something that's going to allow you to really kind of fulfill some of the passions that you have and the ideas that you have in place. And this could be a really cool way to do that. Is that kind of some of the ways that people decide how they're going to spend their time? And are there other things that you've seen people do when they think about how they want to kind of use their time in many retirements? Speaker 2 (8:25) Absolutely. I took a month off to learn tango. I took a couple tango lessons and I was like immediately hooked. And I was like, I need to like fast track my progress in this. So I took a month. off to really study. I think I'm actually going to take another month off this winter to go to Argentina to study tango. But yeah, those hobbies, those interests, I think about what are things that kind of two filters, what are things that don't fit into your nights and weekends? Either because they just technically don't, you can't hike the Camino Friday night to Sunday morning, you're not going to hike the Appalachian Trail during that timeframe, or but maybe it could also be You're like, it should be able to fit in my nights and weekends, but it doesn't because of work and demanding and family obligations and all these other things you have going on. You're like, I should be able to lose 40 pounds. But the reality is you don't have the bandwidth to like find the new gym and find the trainer and figure out new exercises and work at the nutritionist and like come up with a whole new eating style. I took one money retirement where I was like. I turned I was about 40 and I was like I need to figure out how to feed my 40 year old body because my 20s vibe of eating candy for breakfast apparently doesn't work anymore I think I might require vegetables and I was like okay this this is gonna take some time to study some bandwidth to really focus on those other things that matter to you. You know, I did a 10-week road trip once with my five kiddos in a pop-up van or a pop-up camper. We did 10 national parks. Like, you can't do that over a four-day weekend. But I also look at the, it doesn't fit into nights and weekends. Or it's a season in life with an expiration date. That 10-week trip. trip with my kiddos in a pop-up camper, they were all itsy bitsy. They were like two years old to ten years old. Perfect age. And now, like, my oldest is 18, my youngest is starting fifth grade. There's no way I could do that trip now. Like, convincing all of my teenagers to go to national parks where there's no Wi-Fi for ten weeks and not see any of their friends. Like,