[lg]

If it's only 5 years you will feel pressured to find a conventional job that would look good to whoever would be reading your resume if/when you apply for a new job after the experiment is over. If it was guaranteed for life you might do other stuff, not necessarily non-income-producing, but how it would look to HR would be irrelevant.

[AnimalMuppet]

Seems to me that five years is a long time. I could work on a degree for the first four. Or I could work on retraining myself for the first two. Or I could just take the first six months off.

Five years is a long enough time to let you do whatever you're going to decide to do with the first part, and then work on recovering employability/resume credibility/whatever with the last part. An interesting question would be how peoples' behavior changes through the five years, though...