Sabbatical Resources: 100+ Tools for Sabbatical Planning

I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to organising.

So, when it came to planning by first sabbatical, I saved every possible useful resource I could, knowing I’d use them again.

At the point I then built this website, I had a huge list of sabbatical resources – from books, to articles, tool to websites.

So here they are.

I personally use this page all the time, to dig out articles to share with people I’m chatting with on the subject of sabbaticals, and to find tools to plan my trips.

I hope you get as much use out of this page as I do.

Sabbatical Reading

Sabbatical Articles

Every time I find a useful article or post on the subject of sabbaticals, I add it in here.

To make this list easier to navigate, I’ve put ** by some of my favourites.

• How Sabbaticals Have The Benefit Of Building Leadership Capacity
• 22% Of The World’s Top Companies Now Offer a Sabbatical Program
• Forbes: How Sabbaticals Help Our Careers
• The Importance of Slowing Down: Reflections from a 1000Km 6 week walk while on Sabbatical
• How to Build a Life
• Scientists Say That Traveling Makes Us Much Happier Than Any Material Wealth
• **The Religion Of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable
• A Gap Year Isn’t Just For College Kids Anymore
• How To Take A Sabbatical Without Ruining Your Career
• **The Career Value Of A ‘Pointless’ Sabbatical
• Taking A Sabbatical Can Revive Your Career
• **How To Quit Your Job
• Why Your Career Could Use A Sabbatical
• Research Shows Organisations Benefit When Employees Take Sabbaticals
• Sabbaticals Save Our Company
• Why My Company Implemented a Paid Sabbatical Program for Employees
• As Wise CEO Kristo Kaarman takes 3-months off, are we now in the era of the sabbatical?
• How the HR Director for Amazon Devices Took a Sabbatical
• The Ultimate Guide (& Reasons) To Take a Sabbatical – Academia focused
• **Your 30s are a time to go for it (or not)
• How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
• The CEO’s Guide to Sabbaticals: How to Take Extended Time off as a Leader

Sabbatical Books

Here are some of my favourite books on the subject of sabbaticals, mindset or long-term travel

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Travel

Vagabonding is simply the best book I have ever read on the subject of long-term travel. It manages to be both practical and inspiring and taught me a lot of important lessons ahead of our first big trip.

Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need

This book is great at explaining the benefit of saving early and how compound interest grows money at a huge rate over time. Compound interest is your friend and the younger you are, the more you can leverage it. Have a play with this calculator to see what I mean. The author is American, so if you’re based elsewhere then you will have to skip some of the sections about 401ks and the like, but it makes up for it by completely life-changing views on growing money.

How to Travel the World on $50 a Day

The first book by the legendary blogger ‘Nomadic Matt’. It is filled with useful information on how to keep your costs down whilst on the road and has become a bible for frugal travellers.

Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way To Deal With Change in Work and Life 

There is only one constant in life, and that’s change! This is a very simple, but very powerful book that changed my attitude to change forever.

The Four Hour Work Week

This is where it all began for me – the first time I heard about the concept of a ‘mini-retirement’ and that you shouldn’t spend your whole life building up a pot of money, to then not have the energy to use it all.

Die With Zero

Another game-changer of a book. When I needed a kick in the arse, this book came along. It got me thinking about how many years I actually have with my daughter before she moves out, how many I have left with my parents, and that I should spend money now to get enjoyment with them, not hoard it all for some fictional worry later down the line.

Sabbatical Communities

• The Sabbatical Project Facebook Group
• r/longtermtravel

Sabbatical Booking & Research Resources

By Country

Spain

Your Year in Spain
This website helps people with the specifics of taking a sabbatical year in Spain, with everything from rental property listings to useful information about the country

By Interest

Cooking Courses

Sabbatical Planning Tools

Planning

• Notion – This is where I keep my entire life, from travel Wikis to todo lists and project management
• Google Sheets – The only way we kept our finances on track
• Maps.Me – The best offline mapping tool
• Tripline – We loved this for both planning the trip and then using it as a daily mini-blog so our family could see what we were up to
• Scannable – A fantastic iPhone scanning app which we used to upload all our valuable documents to a Dropbox folder which we gave family access to in case of emergency
• MyUKPost – A really useful mail forwarding service who will scan in all your mail and send it to you by email whilst you are travelling
• Duolingo and this post by Tim Ferriss – Great tools if you plan on learning some of the local language before you travel.
• Getting Things Done (David Allen)
  There is no book that will ever teach me more about time management than this one. Whilst I don’t follow it to the letter, I have had an ‘inbox’ ever since and strived to note down ideas quickly which I can review later.

Financial Tools

WEBSITES

• Mr Money Mustache (US based)
• Monevator (UK based)
• Fire v London (UK based)
• Strong Money Australia (Aus based)
• Mad Fientist (US based)
• CaptainFI (Aus based)

ARTICLES

• Our Daily Budget For 35 Countries
• The Power of Compound Interest (How To Grow Wealth Fast)
• Getting Rich: From Zero to Hero in One Blog Post
• These 10 Money Ideas Have the Power to Change Your Life
• 9 Lazy Portfolios for UK Investors
• 50 Ways I Saved (A Lot) Of Money To Travel The World
• The Math That Explains Why Net Worth Goes Crazy After the First $100k – The numbers in this article blew my mind. For example, if you invest $10k each year at a 7% interest rate, it will take 7.84 years to get to $100k but only 6.37 years to go from $600k to $1m. The benefits of compound interest are mind-boggling.
• Tim Ferriss’ podcast discussion with Ramit Sethi – I learned so much from this podcast about how money is there to be used, not just saved.

Pearler
I use this website to do all my investing in Australia. I love the auto-invest feature, which takes an agreed amount from my bank every month and then uses the money to buy ETFs based on my goals. I currently run with a 1/3rd split of tracking the Australian stock exchange, tracking the US stock exchange and a whole world stock exchange tracker excluding US. This I feel gives me a good balance.
Get your first trade for free when you sign up using this link

Sharesight
This website is where I track all my investments in Australia. It is fantastic because it allows me to see everything in one place and also run reports for tax time.
Get 10% off of an annual subscription to Sharesight using this link

Travel and Route Planning

• Wikitravel
• Travellers Point
• Atlas Obscura – Great for finding quirky and unusual places to visit.

Career Tools

Once you’ve had a sabbatical, it may get you to think a lot about your purpose and what kind of career you want.

As I find great career resources, I will add them here.

• Escape The City: Find purposeful jobs, course, events & resources