Mini-Retirements: Test Driving Financial Independence | Ep 561

26:20You don't have to commit to this forever. So every time I see him, he's like, I'm three years into my one-year mini retirement or six years into my one-year mini retirement. But he told me once, he's like, yeah, that first year or two, people were constantly calling like, hey, Bob, oh my gosh, we have this project. It has your name all over it. Man, if you could come back, this would be incredible. It would really help us out. He's like, it doesn't. It doesn't have my name all over it. I know you think it does. It really doesn't. My name's on other things. But until you have those experiences of like, oh, actually, there's lots of different ways to make money.

26:54You only have this hypothetical confidence that that could happen. But take a couple mini retirements, experience it, feel it, know that that's a thing. And then when you go to retire or forever, you'll be like, you know, and if things like don't work out, like I can, I can go do something else because lots of things have shown up when I haven't been working. Yeah. Oh, I like that. It's so easy to fall prey to the scarcity mindset, right? Like grip on tight. This is the only job. This job's amazing. This is the only job I could get. There's nothing else out there for me. I've been here so long.

27:29You could come up with a litany of excuses, right but okay why not test that out and jillian you said something in there that i just want to clarify so mini retirement does not in any way by definition mean you are unemployed because in many cases it can just be hey i'm taking a mini retirement from my current employer i'm just taking a month off two months three months off but i'm still employed with that employer but there are times when a mini retirement could mean I'm between employers or I'm leaving my current job. So it can be the full spectrum of that, right? Yeah. So typically there's like three ways a mini retirement can happen.

28:10You negotiate it off from your employer. And I suggest doing that, especially if you're looking at the one to three month range, because usually HR is equipped to handle a one to three month leave of absence. Like they have the infrastructure there, or you can take a break in between jobs. And that's great if you want to take three months, six months, a year, usually makes sense to do it in between jobs. And then the third thing is life can be unexpected and weird. And sometimes stuff happens and you have some time either because you had to take leave of absence or you lost your job or your mom got sick and you had to go get her settled in a nursing home.

28:48Stuff happens that you're not at your employer for a period of time. So those are kind of the unexpected unplanned ones, which can be just as great as a planned one if you do a little bit of the legwork ahead of time so that you can really lean in and make the most of that time. But those are kind of the three ways it happens. So you might still be employed. And for people just starting out, if you're nervous, you're like, I love the idea. Absolutely no way I could make it happen. Just try to negotiate a month off. you still have your job. You might lose a little bit of income, but you might be able to actually use some of your PTO and stuff and you won't lose all your income.

29:27It's not that expensive. It's very low risk, very potentially high reward because you can do some really cool stuff in one month that is almost a capital investment. If you think about it like a business, you make this upfront investment of time or energy or infrastructure or money in your business with the expectation that it's going to continue to increase your profitability or your efficiency for years to come. And our lives are the same way. If you take a month and make this big upfront investment in yourself, in your hobbies, in your relationships, in your personal growth, in your health, you'll reap those rewards for years, if not decades down the line.

30:11And then when you go to retire, you've made all these capital investments and you're starting on this amazing foundation. You're not starting your life from scratch. Yeah. Yeah. I love that reframe of investments and also experiments, right? Like that's really what we're doing here. We're experimenting at life. And I think it's very easy to get into a rut in life, even if your life is wonderful. And I think I would define my life in recent years as that. And it's my own fault. I wasn't experimenting with things. And I think that's, again, like a really cool rethink on this is, okay, yeah, let's just try something new.

30:48Let's just get out there and see what I like, what I don't like. I'm practicing. One of the ways early retirement or a mini retirement can kind of go off the rails to that idea of practicing is that if you do something you've never practiced or you've never expanded this, there's a likelihood that you won't like it, that it won't go well. And that's really disappointing. So sometimes people have this list of, oh my gosh, I would never be bored in early retirement. I've got like 50 things I want to do and it's going to be awesome. And then they start going through that list and they're like, nope, don't like that.

31:26Actually, I don't want to clean out my garage. Actually, I don't want to remodel my bathroom. Actually, I don't want to learn Spanish. Actually, I don't like going to my cousin's soccer games that much. And dealing with a high percentage of disappointment can feel very disillusioning. You can be like, oh my gosh, I gave up all that money. I gave up that career, all that security for the stuff that isn't as fulfilling or enjoyable as I thought it was going to be. And in kind of my dark sense of humor, sometimes I think of mini retirements as like spread out the disappointment. try all this stuff on this list of 50 things and cross off a bunch of the stuff that you don't like learn that early so you can find new things to experiment with so you can build a better list because you might try five things you might realize you don't like three of them but you've got two that you like cool this is our new list go back to work find a couple more things you want to experiment with test them again so when you get to retirement you actually have a list that's like it's tested, it's proven, you have the foundational work.

32:31Now, instead of starting from scratch, you're scaling these things up, scaling up these things that you know are enjoyable, you know, they're meaningful, you know, you want more time with them because you've actually given them time. Yeah, this is really cool. And it's funny, I'm going to actually refer back to Jess from the pioneers. Again, we did an episode, episode 472, which was the cure for the boring middle. And she talked about this lifestyle design process that was kind of like this iterative loop of identifying elements of things that you want, dreaming big, and then experimentation. And then just, hey, if something works out great, then wonderful.

33:09Keep it on that list. If it doesn't, that's not a failure in that case. It's just you've learned something really important. And yeah, I mean, I think how you were describing this really ties into that beautifully. I think whether people are just on the path to FI or they are truly taking many retirements on the path to FI, I think this experimentation is really, really important. So you kind of loosely referred there to like this list of 50. So it's like dream big, right? Like come up with a list of things that you think you're interested in. And like you said, with the disillusionment, like if you walk into fully FI or retirement, even traditional retirement with some short little list of things like, this is how I'm going to spend the next 40 years of my life.

33:51And they all go bad because you never tested them and you never actually realized like, oh, maybe I don't like sailing or maybe I don't like woodworking. I thought I would, but it just didn't work. Then you're going to be pretty disappointed. You're going to be profoundly disappointed. Let's be clear. But I think Jillian, what you're advocating is, okay, these mini retirements can be this beautiful way of helping to bridge that gap more concretely than maybe even just like a small scale experiment. And I think it also ties into your definition of mini retirement, right? Which is focus on something meaningful and enjoyable for you.

34:27So like when you were describing like, oh, I went to whoever it was at soccer games, my niece or my nephew and like, okay, well, I mean, that's all well and good. Like that can be part of the 168 hours you have a week in your mini retirement. And that's great. We're not telling you to not go to your niece or nephew's soccer game, but that's not really the point of the mini retirement. The point is to find something meaningful and enjoyable for you. So I'd love to hear you talk about that. But as part of this practice, like how does someone who's listening to this today, how do they start actually making this list and start to think about that first real mini retirement?

35:03Like, what does that nuts and bolts look like? Like, are they testing one thing? Should they test, like you just said, three to five? Like, What is that very first? Someone wants to do the bare minimum, right? I don't mean that in a negative way, but they've got one month. They negotiated this. They're dreaming about it. It's going to happen six months from now. How do you get from here to there? So you do have to prioritize. Don't try to do 87 different things because none of them will go well. They just won't. And it'll be very discouraging. So for longer mini retirements, I say up to three goals, but really no more, which is part of the reason we're retiring often because we don't have to do all 87 in one mini retirement.

35:41Take a bunch of them, try different stuff out. But I think about if you think about your next one, what right now feels urgent and important? Where does that Venn diagram cross over for you? And focus on those things that are urgent and important right now for your next one. All right. So up to three goals you said for a longer one, but, but yeah, the short one, is it fair to say someone should maybe focus on one or maybe two at the most if they have a month? And so a, that's, that's my first question. And then second, so right. The urgent and important right now to me, the word, yeah, urgent, urgent's interesting, right?

36:24Because it's like, okay, even in my own life, I'm like, I'm not sure anything's exactly urgent, but I love the word important. Like that, that really resonates with me. So yeah, Like, again, just brass tacks. Like what's the process? Is it like, is it go through your life for a month and think about things that are interesting to you and jot them down? Like if you had someone come to you, one of your, one of your clients, like Jillian, I'm lost. I know I want to take a mini retirement. I feel like I have things that I like to do in life, but maybe I'm so deep in the nuts and bolts, the everyday life that like, I can't even see it.

36:58Like help me design a process where I can find those one or two things that are urgent and important. I think there's a number of different tools that you can use that I do use in the FI community. I would probably start by asking, why do you want to be FI? What did you imagine that to be like? What do you think will be different in your life that's so compelling when you become FI that you're willing to go through this whole process to get it? And maybe we can incorporate some of that in, in this small way. And for people that might be exploring kind of new career options or time with their friends and family, recovering from burnout, investing their health, slow travel.

37:38There must have been some compelling reason that set you on this path. What if we do a sample size of that right now? And the urgent, I don't necessarily mean it like your house is on fire urgent, but what feels pressing, what feels time sensitive, and maybe that's urgent is like, I'm super burned out. I'm exhausted. I can't think. I can't be creative. I should probably deal with that sooner than later. Or my kids are still in grade school, but they're going into junior high. If I don't do a really big road trip or something with them now, I might lose that opportunity. That's urgent. Or your parents' health is declining, but they might have a couple good years.

38:21And you're like, if I'm going to do a fun adventure with them, These are things that I feel like have an expiration date and they're not going to wait in 10 years. Or there's other things that, you know, if you say, I want to do an around the world cruise with my friends, you could do that this year, or maybe you could do that in 30 years. Like it's not really urgent because it could, you could do that at any point in time. It's maybe important, but it doesn't necessarily need to happen next. Right. So that's the intersection of seasons of life, right? Whereas something like, hey, my friends and I want to climb Mount Fuji or Kilimanjaro or something.

38:58Okay, that probably, depending on your age, can't wait 30 or 40 years because of seasons of life. So, okay, I like that. So that's how I'm seeing now how the urgent, and sometimes I can be a little too literal, I think, Jillian. So that was another example. But yeah, it's interesting, right? So focus on something meaningful and enjoyable for you. But what's cool is I think in your answer, you gave such a flavor for it that really opened my eyes in a sense of like, again, with maybe like the old school, like want a gold star or want something like tangible. Like, I think that's where my mind would have went.

39:34It's like, okay, it's got to be something big, like a travel or an adventure, or I did X, Y, and Z. Like, here's the output, which is not the right thing. And you provided a couple of examples, right? Burnout. I'm overcoming burnout. Like, okay, that's really meaningful, truly meaningful. And overcoming that burnout and setting up again, because that's how I'm looking at these many retirements is I'm setting up a better life. As you said, I'm investing overcoming burnout as a perfect example. Another one that's tangentially related, but separate as I'm saying is like, Hey, I really want to focus on my health.

40:09I want to take this one month and maybe set the cornerstones for here's the workout program that I'm going to implement. Here are the 15 ,000 steps I'm going to take a day because I know movement's really important and like actually making that happen. Like that's pretty darn meaningful as far as I'm concerned is coming out of a one month with, Hey, I've proven to myself that I can go to the gym three times a week and I can walk 10 to 15 ,000 steps a day. Like that sounds like a pretty good mini retirement to me. The hardest part for most people in any kind of endeavor is starting. Starting, it takes such a disproportional amount of time and energy and mental and emotional bandwidth.

40:52And I talk about the two drivers of mini retirement. Sometimes it's seasons in life. The other thing is stuff that just doesn't fit into nights and weekends. You're not going to hike the Camino on a four-day weekend. And you're not going to do a 10-week road trip on a four-day weekend. And we get that But there is also this reality of there are some things that even if we theoretically could do it on nights and weekends, we have so little energy. We have so little mental bandwidth. We have so little emotional bandwidth to learn Spanish intensively. Could you fit in 15 hours of that into your week?

41:30Sure. Maybe. If you had no other commitments, no other obligations, your job wasn't stressful. but for a lot of people, it's just probably not going to happen. Even like doing fun stuff with your kids when you're in the thick of it and you're working 40, 50, 60 hours a week and you're picking them up and dropping them off and schoolwork and baths and dinner. Do you have the time and emotional bandwidth to like do a fun adventure every day or to do a cool art project every day? Or like, maybe you should, and maybe we feel guilty that we don't, but sometimes we don't, You know, I'm in my 40s now.

42:06And I remember about three years ago, I started taking time off just to focus on my health because I was like, oh, my body's different now. I can't eat candy for breakfast. And apparently it requires vegetables and protein. I was like, what are these things? What are these things that you speak of? And should I have been able to learn how to do all of this while balancing everything else? sure, we can pile that shame and guilt on ourselves. Or we can say, apparently, it's not happening. So what if I took some time and really focused on this and I gave myself that gift? Or in my 20s, I took a month off and just did a month of intensive therapy, outpatient, six-hour-a-day therapy, which honestly, at any point in your life is a great idea.

42:53But in your 20s, why not just go in there and rehab the whole house? Why not just take it down to the studs, work out all the bugs, like do that capital investment that yes, the work continues. But that one month, that one moment, I honestly delineate my life from pre month of therapy and post month of therapy. It was so intense and so specific. And the trajectory of my personal growth post one month of therapy was radically different. And now that was, I was 27. and now I'm 42, I still feel that. I still feel that capital investment that I made. Yeah, Jillian, I can certainly imagine. Goodness.

43:37And it's funny because I keep coming back to the definition. I'm not usually this literal. You know me, but I guess I do have a strain of it. So it's meaningful and enjoyable. But maybe I would ever so slightly change that to meaningful and or enjoyable, right? Because I think we've talked about examples that like was a month of intensive six plus hour a day. Like, would you say that was enjoyable every single minute of every day? Probably not. I'm taking a wild guess here. But meaningful? By any definition, that was meaningful, right? So this whole thing is really interesting because I think we are all trying to set up wonderful lives.

44:19Whether we concretely think about that on a daily basis or not. I think most people come into this and just say, hey, I want to get my finances in order. Hey, I want to have a position of financial strength. Hey, I want to eventually get to a point where work is optional. But I think most of us realize along the way that that's not the end goal. The money, the number on the screen, it's just not the end goal. I think we often, and hopefully pretty early now, pivot to, okay, look, we do have to design this life. and like you said, so you have the confidence to fully retire when the time comes. And what I love about many retirements is you've set this up today, very specifically, it's such an eye-opener for me.

45:02It's like, it actually hits both sides because it hits again, that money side of, Hey, look, the money's not coming in. You have to practice that. And of course you have to practice the, I have 168 hours or maybe 112 waking hours if you get eight hours of sleep a night, right? But I have 112 waking hours a week that I have to fill. And I think a lot of us do reflexively say like, and maybe recoil in horror when people are like, oh, I could never retire. What am I going to do? Blah, blah, blah. And like my reflexive response to that is, come on, like you mean you have time and resources and you have the entire world of options.

45:42You can't think of how to fill your waking hours. But I think I'm rethinking that as my response because yeah, I do believe that in my heart of hearts to a large degree, but that all said, you're not just going to wake up on day one of retirement or early retirement and know how to do it. You're just not right. Most people have there again, we have very little practice organizing our time in a way that's meaningful and enjoyable because we went to school and they organized it for us. And they told us what to focus on and what success was and where to be and what to do. And then we went to college and it was the same.

46:23And then we had jobs and they said, here's how you have to organize your time. Here's what a good day looks like. Here's what a bad day looks like. And we've had these little tiny snippets of maybe an evening, which was already so packed full of stuff, or maybe a weekend that was so packed full of stuff that we don't actually have a lot of practice when we have this hundred hours stretched out before us. How do we organize that in a way that's meaningful and enjoyable and helps us get closer to our goals and intentions, whether that goal is quality time with people we love or recovering from burnout.

46:58Most people don't know how to recover from burnout because we've never practiced. We've never had the opportunity to do it. And I think there is this bizarre overconfidence of, yeah, I've never done this before, but I'm pretty sure I'm awesome at it. I'm pretty sure there won't be any hiccups along the way. And most people I know, even in mini retirements, and I see this all the time in group coaching. My group coaching is very intensive. It's very long. And people are still sometimes a little bit surprised. Like, oh, I feel a little untethered. I thought I just wanted this vast openness of space, but maybe I need a little bit more structure.

47:35Maybe I need to tweak this. I think there is a, there's an idea if, especially if you're really stressed at your job and it creates a little bit of suffering for you. Sometimes people think as long as I'm not doing that, I'll be happy. And I think happiness is one part reducing suffering, but the other part is increasing the meaning and enjoyment of things. And yes, leaving your job will reduce suffering and you will be very happy for a couple of weeks until you realize you're not really good at the meaning and enjoyment. And there's no shame or no judgment. No one's good at stuff they haven't done.

48:13I wasn't good at it. The only reason I feel like I'm successful now in financial independence is that I've had so much practice. I've been five or 10 years and I've taken a dozen mini retirements. And I'm not perfect at it, but it does get better. You do learn that skill set eventually. Yeah. Jillian, I love that. That to me is the perfect place energetically to end this episode. I think that's the perfect encapsulation. And really it's similar to five, right? Like it used to be, we were running away from something that we didn't love. And like you said, maybe that's good enough for a little bit, but you have to really be running towards something that you absolutely, like you're saying, you find meaningful and enjoyable and that you love.

48:57I think that's what helps make a great life. So I think you've made that case very convincingly to me. And I always love having you on the show, Jillian. It's a pleasure. And I'm super excited for the book. So the book is Retire Often. And like I've said repeatedly, it comes out September 9th, 2025. And you also mentioned, I would have asked you the question, where can people reach you? But I'm going to do it for you. So retireoften.com. You have a podcast, which is fantastic. like you mentioned, group coaching. That's still available. That's something that I took part in a little bit. You were kind enough to let me into the group coaching.

49:32And it's really great. And it helped me really consider and I would say mostly take my own mini retirement. I did the best I could. I know. We laugh about that behind the scenes a little bit. But it really did. I can say without any hesitation, Jillian, that helped me so much. It helped me so much. And it really helped me rethink how I organize my days. And I can give no higher compliment than that. It helped me rethink my entire work life. And you talked about like setting an investment for the future, like being part of that in a tangential way helped set an investment for my future in terms of how I organize days, weeks, and months.

50:18So yeah, a sincere thank you. Oh, it is always so fun being here. Well, it's fun talking to you whenever. Nice. All right, John. Well, until next time and good luck with the book. It really is fantastic. Everybody check it out, retire often. And until next time, thanks for being part of the Chooseify community. Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the Chooseify community. If you haven't already, the best ways to get involved are first subscribe to the podcast. So you're listening to this on a podcast player and just hit subscribe and then subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

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