How Our Sabbatical Works
When I first thought of a sabbatical, I pictured a professor taking a year off to do research in another country. I think Indiana Jones was on sabbatical during all his archaeological adventures. It was something only available to those in academia and not a true break in work, just an opportunity to work elsewhere for a set period of time—luckily I was wrong and the reality can look very different. There are several types of sabbaticals, and so I thought I’d share how ours works and what it means for our family as we prepare for our year-long adventure.
What Is a Self-Funded Sabbatical?
In our case our sabbatical is considered a self-funded sabbatical. Here’s how it works: you agree to work for four years at 80% of your base salary. For example, if your base pay is $100,000, you earn $80,000 per year for four years.
In the fifth year, you get to take a yearlong leave of absence—and you get paid throughout the year during your leave with the money they previously withheld. So you are picking up a paycheck during your leave, but the company isn’t paying you extra; you’ve funded your own time off.
Why This Matters
- Planning: You have to sign up 4 years before you actually leave. I think this can be a sticking point for a lot of people. Knowing what your life is going to look like in 4 years is nearly impossible and it’s tempting to find reasons why a sabbatical won’t work.
- Tax Benefits: By taking the deductions out of your base pay over those 4 years, you’ll pay less in taxes because your annual taxable income will be lower. For anyone in Canada, you’ll know that this can make a big difference. Canadian’s pay a lot of taxes!
- Income while travelling: In theory, whether you have your travel money saved and set aside or coming to you bi-weekly shouldn’t really matter. But in our experience, as you see all those dollars coming out of your account, it’s comforting to see money still flowing in.
- Job Security: Similar to a parental leave, during your leave of absence you’re guaranteed to have a job to come back to, but you’re not guaranteed the exact same position/ role.
- Benefits & Pension: You don’t accrue pension during your sabbatical year, but you can buy it back. Health and dental benefits aren’t automatic—you have to purchase the coverage for year you’re away. Considering we’ll be outside of Canada for most of the sabbatical, finding the right coverage is important.
- Back-out: Our company allows you cancel your planned leave at any point during the 4 years of deductions so if plans change or life interferes, they just pay the money withheld up to that point.
Our Story
Because both my husband and I work at the same company, but this sabbatical is only available to people in certain areas of the company. We spent nearly 10 years where one of us wasn’t in the right spot to be able to sign up. When the stars aligned and we were finally both able to sign up for a sabbatical, we jumped on it.
In fact, Justin signed his paperwork within two weeks of getting back to work after his parental leave with Isabel. We had a 1-year-old and 3-year-old and no what idea what the next four years would look like for them, for us individually or us as a family.
There was a lot of reasons to hesitate: we’d just bought a new house so taking a pay cut wasn’t ideal; the world was still in the chaos of COVID; our kids were so little we barely felt like we knew them and their personalities yet; we hadn’t had much of a chance to travel as a family of 4.
In the spiraling thoughts of what ifs, we asked what if it all works out? What if we get a once a lifetime chance to take a year off work and travel the world with our amazing kids and we enjoy the hell out of it? When you think about it like that, there wasn’t much of a choice. We understand all the hard work, intentional career maneuvers, patience, fortune and bravery that went into making this happen and we will forever be grateful that the stars aligned we get the chance to see for ourselves what if.