Occasional Retirement

I'm reading The Four Hour Workweek. A lot of the material doesn't really apply to me, because

a) I'm happier in my current job than I think most people ever are in any 9-5 situation, and

b) I'm closer to living my dreams than most people ever manage to be. 

That said, I'm really taken with the author's passion for "occasional retirement." I've always thought of retirement as a looming, future state of being: you go to school, you work, and, after giving the best, strongest years of your life to a job, you retire. But author Tim Ferris advises, "Don't save it all for the end. There is every reason not to."

Or, in other words: what if, instead of retirement being a permanent state of being at the end of the line, it became a place you visited, on and off, throughout your life? What if you, instead of waiting to turn 64, you retired just a little — for a month, or a year, or two years — and then went back to work?

Here's an example: one of my biggest passions is travel. Currently, most of my traveling has to be packed into discreet little vacations: a weekend here, a week or so there … when what I really want to do is closer to what Clyde's (retired) dad has just done: spend an entire month in Bangkok. 

So, what if, instead of putting my travel dreams off for twenty years, I were to plan to "retire" for two months in 2010 and spend that time exploring New Zealand at a leisurely pace? 

Starting now, I'd lay the foundation for that dream. First, I'd calculate what expenses would be involved in meeting my mortgage, paying my bills, traveling to and from my destination, covering the cost of health insurance for that time. (The goal here is to know the "cost" of the temporary retirement.) Then, with a firm figure in mind, I could come up with creative ways to cover that cost: eating out less or selling or refusing to buy things I don't need. (Alternatively, I might also find ways my retirement could generate the income needed to cover it … like selling the story of a worker drone's two-month retirement to New Zealand to some magazine in advance.)