We get a lot of questions about our sabbatical. Here are some of our answers.... (part 2)
What's going on with your beard? Are you growing it out for your sabbatical?
As many of you know I love having any reason to grow out my beard. For example, I grew my beard out in honor of the first major release of software I was a part of. It's fun having those goals of "I will not shave until X happens or X gets done." So to answer your question, yes I have indeed been growing it out in anticipation of the sabbatical. In a couple weeks I plan on doing something crazy with it while it's this long. Then after my last day of work I plan on doing some kind of crazy/fun shave so that I can start my time off "from scratch" so to speak. And then I get to grow it out all over again.
What's going on with both of your jobs?
Katie is quitting her job with her last day being at the end of May. She gave them about 7 weeks notice with the hope she could minimize the impact on her fellow physical therapists, assistants, and on the clinic in general.
For me, back in March I broached the subject of quitting to take a sabbatical with my managers at TechSmith. Everyone agreed we'd like our paths to cross again after all this is done, so steps were taken to make that as easy as possible for both TechSmith and myself. So the current plan is to return to the employment of TechSmith when I am finished. My last day of work will be mid June. The exact date of my return has not yet been set.
Are you doing this because you hate your jobs?
Hate is too strong a word, but seeking a break from our jobs has definitely motivated our decision to pursue this sooner rather than later. Don't get me wrong, we have both been blessed with great jobs, and there are many aspects we love and will miss. But over this past year both of our jobs have had their stresses. Katie especially has been feeling very overworked, and it has been a struggle for her to find the motivation to go in each day. For me, I have been struggling off and on with motivation to work on my current projects and with software development in general. We are both hopeful that this break will be rejuvenating and plan to continue to pursue our careers in some form or another when we are done.
How long have you been thinking about this?
We don't remember the exact date we got serious about it, but it has been well over a year. We sat down with our financial advisor in the summer of 2014 to see if it was even feasible and what kind of time frame we'd be looking at. So that was probably our first, "let's make this idea real" moment. But the ground work was being set well before that. Even while we were still dating we'd joke and dream about what early retirement would look like and how cool that'd be.
I thought you weren't going to start until 2016?
We were, but then we changed our minds. Once we started bouncing the idea around with other people, pretty much everyone said don't wait. Also the 2016 mark was a little arbitrary in the first place. We thought it sounded good for Katie to work a whole five years first, but four is really just as good. So with that being our only real reason to wait, and us realizing that planning over a year out was risky since a lot can change in a year, we decided to move it up to summer of 2015.
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