Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Sabbatical FAQ - Part 1

We get a lot of questions about our sabbatical. Here are some of our answers.... (part 1)

What do you mean by sabbatical? Are you going to be studying or researching something?
Sigh... Words are hard. We've called this thing we're doing many different things: early retirement, primary retirement, gap year, year off, quarter life crisis, etc, but sabbatical seems to resonate the best with most people we've talked to. We are essentially just taking a year+ long break from our jobs. We are not taking a sabbatical in the same sense a professor or pastor would. We are not doing any research or anything.

Why are you doing this? 
Why not?... That's the short answer anyway. The long answer we will spread out over several blog posts. But we have definitely thought about this a lot.

What are your goals?
Lots of them, like...
  • Use our time differently
  • Try to feel less busy and over scheduled
  • Explore what it means to live life day to day without a job.
  • Use more of our time to invest in our friends, family, and community around us
  • Take time to explore the world around us
  • Do things that we can't do with the usual limited time off of work
  • Do things now that we might not be able to do later in life
See, we have lots of goals. We do realize that some of those goals conflict with each other. Wanting to do ALL THE THINGS has made making specific plans for the year quite difficult, but we think we've struck a decent balance with our current general plan.

Where are you going on your travels?
What we know for sure is that we are spending this first summer off right where we are at now in Holland, MI. It's a lovely place, especially in the summers. We definitely plan to take full advantage of being near Lake Michigan beaches. Hopefully being here will also give us ample time to spend with the friends and family around West Michigan as well as maybe try to entice a few of our friends out of state to finally come visit us while we're still here.

In the fall we plan to do our first international adventure out to the Asia Pacific area with a couple months split between Australia and Thailand. And the plan is to visit some friends in Hawaii both on the way out there and on the way back. This helps break up the long travels as well as has the added benefit of getting to live life and catch up a few weeks with some pretty cool people that happen to live there.

The winter will be spent back here in the States. We realize most people would be trying to escape the cold and do their tropical international travels then, but we like the winter season and the adventures it brings. We'll most likely spend the first chunk of it doing Christmas stuff with family and friends in both Michigan and Illinois. And the rest of the winter will be dedicated to visiting some friends out West with extended stops in California, Utah, and Colorado. We're hopeful that there will be some rock climbing and snowboarding during those visits.

The rest of the year is bit too far out to have nailed down now. We have lots of ideas. Most of them involve honing in on that goal of spending time with friends and family. So there will be lots of crashing at peoples houses and living life with them for a short while. But we are hoping to mix it up a bit with them too. For example, we think that the Spring will involve time dedicated to the types of travel that our travel enthusiast friends and family would want to do. We've told lots of groups that if they'd like travel buddies, we're available for whatever adventure they like, assuming we can afford it. Sounds like at least a couple people are wanting to take us up on that offer. From the ideas we've heard about so far it sounds like we might be bouncing around Europe a bit. And if we do make it over there, we'll hopefully get a chance to see some friends that live out that way as well.

But wait, what about New Zealand? You should go there...
We know... we know... Believe us, it's on our list. We just don't have enough time to do it justice. Plus if we went to New Zealand, we would want to travel all over and that's just not the type of traveling we're looking to do this trip. We'll get there someday.

Are you keeping the place where you currently live in Holland?
We will keep it through the summer, but plan on giving it up when we start our travels.

What are you going to do with all your stuff? 
We see this as a great opportunity to pare down and clean house. So we will be getting rid of as much stuff as possible either by selling it or giving it away. The few things we decide to keep we'll put in storage.

Will you move back Michigan after you are done?
Not going to lie, a lot can happen in a year. But at the same time we have a great community in Michigan that would be really hard to leave behind. It definitely seems most likely we'll come back and live somewhere in Michigan, but we're not making any promises.


That's all for now... check back again later for Sabbatical FAQ - Part 2