[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+.