There are many types of benefit programs out there.  Each company has a plan for how to handle vacation time with its employees.  It’s that time of year for me when I need to either use up vacation, or lose it.

Variety in Vacation Plans

Now, some companies will simply give you some vacation time, and you either use it up in your year or lose it.  This is about as simple as it gets.  The only confusing part for some people is when the cutoff date is.  The hard part can sometimes be finding a "convenient" time to use it during the year without negatively affecting your productivity at work.  This is the plan I’ve got.  I just need to use it by the end of this month or it’s long gone.

Other companies will allow you to roll over vacation days from one year to another.  There’s various limits on rollovers so that you can’t accumulate more than say, 2 months of vacation time before you start to lose them.  I know companies used to let you accumulate them indefinitely and even use them as sort of an "early retirement".  This is nice for those times where you simply can’t find time to use vacation by a given week in the year.

Still, some companies will even place a dollar amount on your free time and offer to just pay you regular time or holiday time for your vacation days that you don’t use.  People who don’t take time off can make some extra money by cashing in their vacation days.

So what’s a vacation day worth to you?

For me, it’s pretty simple.  Skipping vacation time means I just lose it.  So you bet I’m going to be taking every single hour of vacation I have.  I put in plenty of unpaid overtime anyway, so it’s more of a formality than anything else.  Such is the life of the non-hourly employee.

Photo by sabal-bruce

I have to wonder how it would be if I could cash in my days of vacation though.  How much would I really need for a day to justify not taking it and spending extra time relaxing?  What kind of projects would I want to work on instead of taking an extra day’s wages?  Would I even let myself do it unless I absolutely had to?

I’d like to think that I would still use up most of my vacation time were this the case.  Though, the in-debt side of me would also consider a couple weeks of vacation being cashed in like a part-time job.  A couple of weeks is a couple thousand bucks for me.  I think I’d probably try to take as much of that money as I could until I cleared away some of this debt. 

Would a day of vacation be worth a couple hundred dollars for you?  What other types of plans are there out there?  How do you freelancers and contractors deal with this?