Employment
Funding A Time-Out
Wednesday, January 01, 2003
Betsy Wiesendanger
Consumer Reports
Here's how:
Check if your employer offers a paid leave. Many do. For example, American Express permits one to six months of salaried time off for certain community service. At Xerox, which offers up to one year off, recent employee projects included construction of a dormitory for a Nicaraguan orphanage and teaching job skills to welfare recipients.
If your employer has no paid leave policy, read through a copy of "Six Months Off: How to Plan, Negotiate, & Take the Break You Need Without Burning Bridges or Going Broke" by Hope Dlugozima, James Scott and David Sharp. It offers terrific tips on how to negotiate a leave.
Trade a bonus or a raise for time off. Another tactic: Volunteer for a special project during a crunch time, put in lots of extra hours, then use those accrued hours for an extended paid leave.
If you're footing the bill yourself, take the time to fully list every expense you might incur. Include predictable but oft-forgotten expenses that can zap a budget. For example: Are the holidays coming? You'll need to buy gifts. Do you owe money on your credit card? You'll need to maintain monthly payments. Then, add at least a 10% safety margin to the total you come up with.
Even if you're short of cash, do not take out a loan or a credit card cash advance, warns Howard S. Dvorkin, president of Consolidated Credit Counseling Services in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Minimum monthly payments on a loan of $15,000 (a reasonable amount for six months off) run about $450 a month, he notes. And that kicks in 30 days after you get the dough. Few people can take on that kind of debt without being swamped. Instead, start cutting your costs now and build savings.
Apply for a grant, scholarship or fellowship. More than 50,000 such awards are available for amazingly diverse purposes, says Dan Cassidy, president of the National Scholarship Research Service in Santa Rosa, Calif. "You can go on an archeological dig, take a cooking class in Paris, even travel or write a book," he says. Start your research with the "Annual Register of Grant Support" (available at most libraries) and David J. Cassidy's "International Scholarship Directory".
