reducing hours - the right choice...

A couple of things I've noticed from others who have reduced their hours, of course depending upon the role.

Reduction of hours as a shorter week can mean you end up with the same workload, you just have to do it in a shorter space of time. Win for the employer there as you just have to play catch up from the day you weren't there.

But, have a Monday or a Friday off each week and you may stand to accrue some bank holidays as leave at another time as you weren't scheduled to be working that day anyway. If your offices always close on bank holidays that is. Win for employee.

Reduction in the working week also means using less annual leave for a week or two off, but you need to compare this with the pro rata reduction in holidays. Working TTO you know where you are with holidays but as you said you're restricted to busier and more expensive times for booking actual trips.

I would lean towards a 4dw also I think on balance. Having a six week summer break and a few two week breaks I'm pretty sure I wouldn't use the whole time in a productive way, always thinking that I'd got ages until I'm back at work and before I know it I've spent a week not getting dressed until lunchtime. That could just be me. :-)

Another point that's just occurred to me, if you are TTO what if you need an odd day off for something? Will you have any paid leave to cover for the odd home emergency, funeral etc? Much easier to swap your one day off to cover eventualities in this case.

Nice predicament to have anyway, hope that will be me before too long. :-)

ReadingTim wrote: »

One more thing with a 4DW. I know you said you preferred shorter breaks to longer holidays, but realistically, would you get that by just having long weekends every weekend?

Dunno about you, but with me, the risk would be that you end up mooching round for that additional day doing not a lot (friends etc possibly being at work), meaning you'd still need to book additional days off if you wanted to go anywhere too far away. Yes, it's nice having a day off when everyone else is at school or work (it feels naughty, like bunking off school), but you probably want to be sure you'd use that time usefully, given you'll be working every week, including school holidays....

I went down to three days before I retired. What I did was to start doing things on those days that I would be carrying on in retirement. I joined the gym and started volunteering.

It made the transition easier as I had days where I was occupied when retirement kicked in. I knew folks at both places - and it was easy to increase attendance if I wanted to.

working 46.4 with 5.6 weeks holiday.

TTO 39 weeks and 4.7 paid weeks holiday leaving 8.3 weeks/41.5 days unpaid

4DW will have 52 days unpaid.

you still get 5.6 weeks with a just each week is 4 days