The early registration discount for Design Your Life in Retirement ends on August 15th. Register here ______________________ 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. _______________________ Mentioned in This Episode The Sabbatical Project | Inspiration for the Experience of a Lifetime _______________________ 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. _______________________ For More on Steve Hoffman A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France Website _______________________ Podcast Episodes You May Like Edit Your Life – Elisabeth Sharp McKetta Practicing Retirement STILL – Mary Jo Hoffman Inward Traveler – Francine Toder PhD _______________________ 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.