[chungleong]

Paid leaves aren't mandated by law. The norm is two weeks for salaried workers. Most people don't used them up anyway. There's no tradition of everyone going on vacation in the same month in the US. That makes people feel somewhat guilty leaving their jobs behind. Even while on vacation many end up working.

Americans do switch jobs more frequently. People have more occasions to unwind between jobs (perhaps cashing out their unused leaves to pay for a big trip).

[tzs]

Another reason for not using them up is that one of the times of year that many people do often want to take time off during has a lot of paid holiday days already for many people, so you can get a large block of time off only using a few vacation days.

I'm speaking of Christmas/New Year, which many people like to take off to be with family.

At many places, Christmas and the day before are paid holidays, and at many places New Years and the day before are also paid holidays.

Suppose that in a given year you get a Tuesday and Wednesday off for the Christmas holidays and Tuesday and Wednesday off next week for New Years.

With one day of vacation (Monday), you turn the Christmas holiday into a block of 5 consecutive days off (2 weekend days, 1 vacation day, 2 holidays). Toss in 2 more vacation days (Thursday and Friday), and now for a cost of 3 vacation days you 9 consecutive days off.

Add another vacation day next Monday, and four a total cost of 4 vacation days you get 12 consecutive days off. 6 vacation days will get you 16 consecutive days off.

If you job is such that it naturally gets a lot less busy during the holidays, and it is possible to do it remotely, you might even convince your employer to work at home on some of those days, which will be such light work that it does not interfere with your vacation activities, but counts as a work day, not a vacation day.

I've usually been able to do that at least one day each week--check some logs, run some scripts that fix some database problems that some old crappy legacy code that no one ever gets the time to rewrite cause, spend 10 minutes or so figuring out to fix a couple things the scripts cannot, and then just check work email a few times during the day to look for anything else that comes up (which usually is nothing), and my employer will let me call that a work day...and so I can get those 16 consecutive days off with only 4 days vacation used.

Even if you are only earning two weeks (10 days) of vacation a year, if you take you vacations as above it is easy to end up accumulating them.

[jeromegv]

While people might switch jobs more often, is that supported by data that they use this time to unwind? You end up without health insurance coverage during that gap so I can’t imagine tons of people going in that direction.

[maxxxxx]

From what I have seen most people leave their job on Friday and start the new one next Monday. Almost nobody takes time off. Also, a lot of companies want you to start tomorrow. I have told companies that I want to take a month off before starting there and it seemed they couldn't even comprehend the concept.

[ghaff]

>You end up without health insurance coverage

There's COBRA although, of course, you don't have the employer portion paid for any longer.

I'm a bit skeptical that the typical person takes a lot of time off between jobs. If you've already got a position lined up, your new employer probably wants you to start as soon as possible. You can probably negotiate 2 or 3 weeks but, in most cases, I expect a real sabbatical would be tough.

And, if you don't have a job lined up, I probably wouldn't be confident enough to just take it easy for a couple months.

[chungleong]

There certainly are a lot of Americans who mismanage their finances. Standard advice is to have at least six months of saving at your disposal. If you can't take a afford a break at a time of your own choosing then how are you going to cope when you get laid off during a recession?

[ghaff]

It's one thing to have a reserve for emergencies and another to tap into that reserve because you want to take a few months off before looking for a new job. Though absolutely nothing wrong with that if you're in the position to do so and it's a priority.

But I've always taken a lot of vacation, including a number of trips up to a month while working. The one time recently when I had a job lined up I did push things out a few weeks which was just fine. The time before that was in the middle of the dot-com bubble bursting and I considered myself lucky to get something fairly quickly; it could easily have been many months+.