Right? My blog post on the same subject would be more on the lines of "freak out about how to have a roof over my head next month and not have my family's health insurance cancelled..."
And some, like myself had their life savings wiped out when life got cute.
Anyway, glad OP has the opportunity to do what he's doing. Didn't mean to sidetrack the conversation. Just always find it amazing how we all live in vastly different worlds.
The average person in this industry makes good money, and should have the ability to save and invest some of their income.
Not rare at all, 1 in 5 Americans is being pursued by collection agencies for being unable to pay medical bills.
You know what they say about lies and statistics... In all seriousness, even if this dubious statistic is true, most of those are not due to terminal or debilitating illnesses. "Unable to pay medical bills" can be for a variety of reasons, ranging from the obvious (not having the money), to confusion, to billing errors or insurance problems.
Real estate is too expensive, interest rates on cash are too low and VCs have a monopoly on the startup space and the media.
The most rational option seems to be to invest in stocks... To fuel corporations which inflate real estate prices by forcing their employees to relocate to major urban centers. The same corporations which are responsible for the low interest rate environment (through their lobbying and corruption of government agencies). The same corporations which are responsible for monopolizing the startup space by only funding and acquiring incubator and VC-backed startups.
So yeah there aren't many ethical options. That's why I invest in cryptocurrency. I'd rather risk losing all the money than fund my own (and everyone else's) enslavement.
I wonder if there will be a trend towards bootstrapping?
What does this have to do with it? Insurance would cover it just the same as if you hadn't quit your job.
I also took a hiatus from working and meeting expenses has never even been a concern for me, despite dealing with some quite serious medical issues. During my hiatus, I am constantly dumbfounded by people's lack of understanding of how I'm not totally broke without a job. If you have even the most basic budgeting skills and have decent enough job that you aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck, saving up enough money to live off of for 6-12 months is pretty easy. I only had a moderate salary, live in a medium-to-high CoL area, and wasn't particularly thrifty (I still engaged in normal spending like taking international trips places, buying new things, had a decent apartment, etc), and over the course of a 3 years I easily was able to save up enough to be jobless for multiple years living off of those savings alone. And that includes maintaining my savings for retirement, too.
What I was thinking of was that many people don't want to work very hard now to gain rewards later when there is a risk they won't live until later to enjoy it. So they do things like take a few years off at 27 and then go back to work until, say, 38, instead of working straight through until 34 and retiring permanently then.
And no, I don't mean ignore the common-sense stuff like having life insurance if you have a family, etc.