No exciting bridge-burning, rage-quitting story here, just someone who had the FU-money-confidence to prioritize my time over a paycheck.
I'm having a baby in July (yay!). My company is a big corporation but has a generous (for for the US) parental leave policy: STD paid at 100%, plus an additional 4 weeks at 100% pay for bonding. This coincidentally gets you to 10-12 weeks fully paid of the 12 weeks of FMLA job protected (but not guaranteed to be paid at all) leave. 12 weeks/3 months of maternity leave is pretty standard for the US, but usually most of that is unpaid for most folks. So all in all, my company is pretty solid.
I, however, said F that. I WILL stay home for 6 months with my new baby, and paying me or not during that time is no nevermind to me. Thankfully, my immediate leader was on board with an extended (unpaid, obviously) leave from the get-go, but I was fully prepared to play hardball with him if he wasn't.
This request threw HR for a loop, though. In my huge, long-running company, apparently no one (????) has ever asked for an extended parental leave? My idea was to just tack on a sabbatical/unpaid personal leave at the end of my maternity leave (both leave types exist and I personally know colleagues who have done both leave types at my company), plus maybe burn some personal vacation I've been hoarding as well. But when I asked for the two leaves adjacently, it was like I had grown 4 extra heads, HR had no idea how to handle it and were hemming and hawing over if it were possible or not.
If I hadn't had FU money, I probably 1) wouldn't have even considered taking a multi-month unpaid leave in the first place and 2) would have dropped it right there when I ran into resistance, and just done the normal maternity leave. But since I did have FU money, I stood firm, basically planned my own leave myself by studying all the policies, and basically forced HR to (reluctantly) go along with my plan. It was a lot more work than I was expecting, and I'm annoyed at the comical red tape I had to wade through and the patchwork policies that I had to string together because we live in the US, but in the end I got the full 6 months that I wanted. I call that a FU success!