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Comment by empira | Hacker News Reader

My previously employer offers just that : you could spend money to 'buy' up to 10 (more) days of holidays per year (for context, you start with 20 mandatory days, plus 10 to 15 depending on your seniority and your age). It would cost you exactly what it would costs the company to pay you, and seems redondant with simply taking un-paid holiday. They were several benefits to this though : those extra days would become part of your offical compensation, so you are entitled to take them in the year, and you do not need his approbation. It is also slightly better for your pension and your taxes to buy those days rather than take un-paid holidays.

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But doesn't this cost the company more due to taxes and salary side costs.

At least in Germany this would either not be a good deal for the employee or employer.

Also I'm not sure how legal it would be in Germany and other EU countries.

This would conceivably work by adjusting the work schedule. So if you want 2 extra vacation days this month you simply get assigned to a 90% working time (and salary). Your standard holiday days stay untouched but your salary goes down proportionally, and so do the employer's taxes.

It's a regular feature in NL. You can even do arbitrage. Buy extra vacation days, save some of the days you regularly get in excess of the legal limit (the legal days expire in 18 months, those above in 60 months). Sell those at a later date for your then current income. Beats saving.

Edit: thanks, spelling

Off-topic nit: I think you mean "arbitrage", the practice of buying something where it's cheap and selling it where it's expensive. "Arbitration" is a method of resolving disputes by having a neutral third party decide what the correct outcome is.

Strictly speaking, this is not an arbitrage, because (a) you run the risk of not getting an above-inflation pay rise, and (b) even if such a pay rise is a certainty, you are locking your money up while you wait for it. The latter point makes it a carry trade, rather than an arbitrage.

If you could sell your future interest in refundable vacation days now, for more than it cost you to buy them, that would be an arbitrage.

I do something similar though different with my German employer. My employer lets me send my yearly bonus (or part of it) into a time account, i.e. the money gets converted into hours based on my hourly salary. Every five years, I have the option of withdrawing hours from the time account to take a sabbatical (with the normal salary payments just continuing in the meantime). And if I don't withdraw all of it by the time of retirement, the rest gets withdrawn for an early retirement with full pay.

Interesting idea. I assume you're buying that time with post-tax money? As opposed to an unpaid holiday which would lower your taxable income.

I'm in a similar situation, and its all setup pre-tax. You elect it at the beginning of the year, and it effectively lowers your salary by the fraction you choose not to work.

Pretty neat, but its capped, otherwise I suspect there would be people who elect to work for 4 months a year (or something similar) for 1/3 of their salary.

Isn't that just regular part time work? People do that all the time.

In the Netherlands there's even a law that states that you can request working part time in basically any fraction of a full work week and the company _must_ grant it unless they can show grave impact to their business that couldn't be resolved by hiring and/or training more people. Your pay is altered in the same proportion, ie you can work 50% of the time for 50% of the pay. This would probably be more difficult in the states, since health insurance is not as strongly linked to having a job over here.

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