I’m battling burnout with a year off work – here’s how we’re budgeting for it

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by Robin

Last year burned me right down to ashes. The years before that didn’t help much either. I felt emotionally drained and more than a little broken. And I’ll admit it – midlife crisis’ are for real:

• Being a dedicated employee with at-times emotionally difficult work is an energy drain.
• Being a try-so-hard parent takes an energy level that chronic insomnia doesn’t allow.
• But, being the caregiver of an ageing and failing parent takes more effort and emotional strength than the other two combined.  Especially since that parent is the most difficult and challenging relationship I’ve ever had.
• Add to this the death of loved ones – and the effort and grief that came before and after these losses.

If there ever was a recipe for burnout that was it – seasoned with a little bit of bad timing, trips to the hospital, jury duty, moving my mother to a home and selling her property.

But after my nuclear spring, many of my challenges have resolved – and most in the best ways possible.  I was left with a very different looking and feeling life.  A life with more hope.

The focus of my personal life and work had shifted: I wasn’t managing the difficult, sad, frustrating, hurtful, important details of quite so many people and projects.  There was more room in my calendar, and in my brain, for myself.

I now had space and time for me – and also for my husband and children.  They had been patiently waiting in the wings while I focused on my exhausting performance for so many others.

But what did we want now?  What did I want now?

When the heavy stuff was shifted from my shoulders – something didn’t feel right.  I didn’t remember how to choose things for my happiness.  I’d been in survival mode for so very long.  I was waiting for the next crisis – that blissfully wasn’t coming.  I could take some of the newly vacated brain space and give it to me.

The more time I had to listen to myself the more I knew I needed a change.

Absorbing two audiobooks on my commute led me to hear two essential things missing in my life: self-compassion and creativity.

• I needed to show myself the kindness I was so freely giving away to others.  (This is the book that led me to focus on self-compassion.)
• And I needed space to feed my starving creative soul.  (This is the book that reminded me of the joy of creativity.)

As I was having these long and kind conversations with my soul some creative opportunities started joining in:

• The first was an idea for a novel that wouldn’t leave me alone.
• The second was meeting with companies that wanted to work with us here on the blog.

I am fortunate to have a job (for over 18 years!) at a workplace that was open to accommodating my request for a one-year leave to focus my time in new ways.  I hope I’ll return to work there with renewed energy.

But this year off work – while therapeutic –  does not come free – or even cheaply.  This will mean a drastic cut in our income.  At the very least we don’t want this year to put us back into debt. 

We are going to need to cinch our belts even tighter and get even better at living frugally – plus earn some money in different ways.  That’s what the rest of this post is about – how we’re paying for my year off work!

So, here’s how we are affording my year of creativity and self-compassion:

1. We have paid off our debts.

After years of focused frugal living, we have paid off all our student loans, car loans and all our consumer debt – except for our mortgage.  We’re intentionally comfortable with the mortgage (- and we’ll share more about that later).

One of the best reasons to kill off your debt is exactly this: freedom.  Sure, not paying interest is important, but what’s better is that without debt bossing you around you can make decisions based on what you want – not based on past purchases haunting you.

2. We started with our Spending Plan.

We’ve professed our love of Spending Plans before!  So much better than budgets.

Before I approached my work (or even Ed) with my year-off idea, I spent a lot of time with our Spending Plan spreadsheet.  I needed to figure out if this was even a possibility.

There are a lot of spending categories that got fattened up after our debts were paid.  They needed slimming.  I sliced and diced our spending plan in lots of ways.  I’ll outline them below.

3. We have a frugal healthy food plan.

After our mortgage, our food budget is the next biggest budget line.  It’s likely true for you too.

First, we’re going to need to eat out less often.  Dinners out and takeout meals crept into our spending after we axed our debt.  For many people, the eating away from home thing is part of what’s killing their bottom line.  We will still eat out on occasion and when we do we’ll use these restaurant money saving strategies.

Next, we will have a renewed focus on eating well at home on a budget.  We’ve shared lots of tips on this over the years, and these posts outline the exact strategy we will follow:

• How we save money on groceries without coupons
• Our simple and effective menu planning strategies (starting with this first essential step that no one seems to talk about!)
• We’ll grow more of our own food – especially in the raised garden beds that we made years ago.  After a few years of choosing plants with our kids, our 11-year old son has requested a garden bed of his own this year (parenting win!) so we will need to find other places to grow more.  (We hope to have a huge bounty that we can preserve for later.)

4. We will find even more Affordable Entertainment.

• We will use the library more.  We can get books, magazines, audiobooks and more for free.  Over the years, after we paid off our debt, we got a bit lazy in this area and instead of waiting for our library hold to come up, we’d just purchase it online.
• Make wine and beer at home.  So much cheaper than in the stores!  Ed’s tips put the quality in quantity are here: how to make your own wine and homebrew beer.
• Keep our old computers going.  We like to buy refurbished tech and then keep it speedy ourselves.  Here’s more on that.
• We may need to revisit the amount we get each month for Pocket Money – but we’re holding off – this amount is pretty small and it works so well for us to manage our personal spending without meddling in each other’s business.
• More creative – less cost – birthday parties like we’ve done in the past.
• More simple and fun family adventures that cost close to nothing.
• More road trips, fewer flights
• More creative at home date nights

5. We will do more ourselves again.

• No more housekeeper.  When life was especially Cuckoo for Cocoapuffs we hired a housekeeper to take some of the pressure off twice a month.  It’s a great gift to give yourself when time is stretched.  However, this year, time will be what we have most of – so no need to pay for housekeeping.
• I am planning new series of housework hacks as I streamline these hateful tasks: Good Enough Housekeeping.  Stay tuned for more!

6. Even more careful utility use.

• When my leave first started, I did my best to keep the heat down low during the day: warm sweaters and socks and I kept out of the cold basement.  (Even though we’ve been working on making that basement an awesome retreat – check that out here!)  We’ve got other tricks to save electricity in winter, too.
• This summer we’ll be using these strategies to keep cool for way less cash.
• We will more often make the eco and thrifty choice to line dry our laundry (there are even more reasons to do this too!)

7. We will Make do.

• Making do is the least sexy, but most effective strategy for saving money.  For example, our wash machine is old, ugly with rust and beeps randomly – but we’re keeping it going because it’s paid for.  (When we do finally replace it, we’ll use our Frugal Shopping Tips.)
• Delayed gratification – Ed wrote this great article about this.  We will go back to learning the benefits of waiting before we leap into purchases.
• Home hair colour.  I’m a hair salon drop out.  I tried for a few months but the cost and the time it took just never felt worth it.  I’m going to pay 90% less and do my colour at home by using these tips.
• We’ve always demonstrated living frugally to our kids.  We’ve shown them how to make more Lego kits with what we already have, for example.  We’ve given them chores and allowances for years and they have learned to work and save.

8. We will cut back on transportation costs.

• My job included a 1/2 hour commute each way.  There’s going to be a nice savings on gas and vehicle wear and tear this next year.  We will still use our strategies to save on gas, we just won’t need this as much.
• Ed walks to work and I’ll be working at home.  We’ve been a one-car family for many years – this is a huge money saver – we estimate $7200 a year! (When my mom stopped driving a couple years ago she gave us her old car – which doesn’t start consistently to say the least.  We rarely use it.  If it was worth anything we’d sell it.  But keeping it doesn’t cost us much, so we do for those busy times when we both need to take kids somewhere or life blows up.)

9.  We will make more gifts

• This one has me legit excited.  I’ll now have time to focus my crafty self on making gifts, instead of buying them.  (I loved making this gift for my friends’ three boys.)  I’m looking forward to sharing even more ideas here!

10.  We will save on clothing purchases

• This isn’t a big budget line for us anymore.  It was when we were first married – it was ridiculous how much we used to spend on clothes (mostly me).  Small nations wished they had that size of budget.  Now we use these strategies and look good while spending so very little.
• We will use these strategies for Back-to-School shopping.

11. We will bring in new sources of income.

• We’ve got things we don’t use.  I’m excited to clear out this clutter AND get some money by selling them.  We will use these strategies to sell things online.  I’m going to use my local Facebook auction to clear out stuff too (tips on that here).
• We’re going to try to earn more money with this side business of ours:
  • We will invest more time in blogging here for you all.  You can expect more frequent posting from the trenches of living well on a tight budget.  I have three zillion ideas of what to share!
  • We plan to work more with companies to bring you projects and ideas.  Working with brands is a great way to earn some extra income blogging.  Be assured: we will put you our readers first when deciding who to work with; we won’t start shilling crappy products or anything like that.  Our partnerships will continue to be authentic.
• By the way, if you’re interested in starting a money-making blog with little to no money – we wrote all about it here.

12.  Protect Important Spending: What we’re NOT cutting.

• Our kids both take music lessons.  This is an expensive monthly cost – but way too important to cut!
• We’re still going to do some travel – adventures as a family are really important to us – we will figure out how to travel better on a budget – and share more frugal travel tips here!
• Pets. These little bundles of fur and love are darn expensive.  We recently adopted a new kitty into our family.  Indiana (our dog) and Sabine (our cat) will still get the quality food and care we’ve always given them.  Though they may need to get jobs 😉
• DIY.  We’re dyed in the wool DIY dorks.  It’s seriously what we love to do together; dinner and a movie pale as date night ideas for us.  We will still do a ton of DIY projects – hopefully, we can work with some more great companies to still bring you lots our ideas and tutorials – without killing our budget.  Not that our projects are ever super expensive, but it adds up!
• We’ve still got our 3-season weekend place, you might remember our Mobile Home Makeover project.  The cost of this seems pretty decadent in light of this drastic pay-cut year, but we’re in it deep.  We can’t sell it just because of this year off.  And just as importantly, we savour our time as a family there.  We love the escape from busyness and technology it gives us.  We love the sound of the river and the connection with nature.  We’ll continue to work on the place, and share it here, with a view to selling it for a profit when the kids no longer love it like they do.

Are you burned out, too?  Could something like this work for you? Maybe frugal living could afford you part-time work?

I’d love to hear from you and answer any questions if you’ve got them – just leave them in the comments below!

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