Have you asked?
What was your reasoning?
How have you negotiated?
Did you get your company to continue paying your healthcare?
Any words of wisdom?
- Yes.
- Wanted to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, all of it, in one shot.
- There was no negotiating necessary. If they said no, then I would have quit. Other companies in the industry were hiring at the time, so post hike I would have worked for one of them. After a few years, I would have come back to original employer.
- The policy for sabbaticals for "personal" reasons (e.g. any leave not mandated by law, like FMLA) is that the company keep paying for the health plan for 3 months. After that, it was COBRA. Seeing as my sabbatical was 6 months long, I simply budgeted for paying COBRA for 3 months as part of the cost of the hike.
- Words of Wisdom: Have a concrete purpose for the sabbatical. Taking a year off to "find yourself" without a plan of how to do that would be horrible (yay....a year of loafing around, joy, joy). In my case, I had a personal mission to accomplish - to walk from Mexico to Canada. There was plenty of "reflection" time in there, of course - when you're hiking 12 hours a day, day in day out, there's plenty of time to think about things. One of my takeaways from that hike is the desire to RE so I can do things like that any time I want. Some time after I went back to work, I was hunting around the web for early retirement stuff and found Jacob and ERE and the rest is history, so to speak.
As a side note: One hiker I met back then has structured their entire life around the annual sabbatical. They found an employer that is willing to cut them loose every summer for ~3 months or so, so they can go hiking. The other 9 months of the year, this person works and saves to pay for the next summer's hike.