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If you’re pondering early retirement, have you considered another option? For some people a sabbatical offers an an opportunity to recharge, reflect and to experience a new adventure.

Steve Hoffman’s book A Season for That details the experience of an extended leave with his family in a winemaking village in France. It may inspire you to imagine what a sabbatical experience may do for you. While your vision for a sabbatical may be quite different, you’ll be interested in hearing what he learned from it – and how it’s shaping his ideas about retirement.

Steve Hoffman joins us from Minnesota.

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Mentioned in This Episode

The Sabbatical Project | Inspiration for the Experience of a Lifetime

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Bio

Steve Hoffman is a Minnesota tax preparer and food writer. When he dies, the tax-preparer-food-writer industry will die with him. He is a French speaker and shameless Francophile. His writing has won multiple awards, including the 2019 James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. He has been published in Food & Wine, The Washington Post, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Artful Living magazine. His first book, A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France, published in July 2024, edited by Francis Lam. It is the story of his family’s gradual (then precipitous) acceptance into a tiny winemaking village, of his bottom-up education in Mediterranean food and wine, and of a hard-won self-acceptance in mid-life.

Hoffman shares one acre on Turtle Lake, in Shoreview, Minnesota, with his wife, Mary Jo, their elderly and entitled puggle, Jack, roughly 80,000 honeybees, and a nesting pair of sandhill cranes who summer in the back yard.

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For More on Steve Hoffman

A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France

Website

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

Edit Your Life – Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

Practicing Retirement STILL – Mary Jo Hoffman

Inward Traveler – Francine Toder PhD

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Wise Quotes

On Investments for Retirement

“I would wish on behalf of my clients that they started spending their money a little bit earlier in a lot of cases. Money is a means not an end. It’s very easy to slide that over into the 401k and you’re watching that grow and it seems as if you’re accomplishing something that’s more or less automated. And there can be a form of losing sight of other important things that are really also investments, if you think about family, if you think about friendships, and if you think about skills that are outside of work. Those are investments too, and they have an ROI, and they pay off later and they require a certain amount of deferred gratification, but they’re in many ways as important. But I do think that those other things are more intangible, they’re harder to put a price tag on.”

On Seasons of Life

“And when you live in wine country you realize not every vintage is better than the last vintages. There are good vintages and bad vintages, but they come around every single year, and you live your life there by saying, Okay, this is the season for the harvest, this is all we do right now, this is what this part of the world is offering us, and we have no choice but to do this because this is what the season tells us we need to do. And if that leads to a bad vintage, that’s okay, you did your best. And then that same harvest is going to come around next year, and you’re going to give it another effort. So I just found it a really refreshing way of looking at life. And then there is an additional element to that which is that there are sort of seasons of the year, but then there are seasons of a life. And there are times when you need to be a parent, and you can’t do other things that you might like to do if you’re going to be good at that part of your life. And so, there was some choosing that that got presented to me at the end of that book, and, and some hard choosing. And I tried to let my choices be guided by trying to recognize Well, what is this season of my life?”

On Practicing Retirement

“I think one of the pitfalls of our thinking about retirement is often that we believe it’s going to be starting over, or it’s going to be escaping from all that we didn’t like about what came before. And inevitably, whether you like it or not, it’s an extension of all that you’ve done before. So I would say thinking of it not as a new life, but Act Three of an ongoing unfolding life is really important. The other thing I would say is with this idea of practicing for retirement is thinking in decades is really valuable. Retiring is not the answer to problems, it will exacerbate them in many ways. And so I think, on thinking in decades, I also think of double checking your relationships. Do you, and if you’re married, and your spouse share a narrative about what this Third Act is going to look like? A lot of people go in just thinking they’re on the same page, and then they stare at each other across the coffee table on Day One and say, Who the hell is this? Checking your marriage, checking your friendships, have you are you just maintaining them? Are you actually investing in them? And checking in with your kids? Is there some repairing to be done? Can you pave the way for those relationships to be something that enriches this Third Act rather than potentially causes you to have to work at things that could have been handled earlier?”

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About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host 

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.