Your time off

Did you know;

"1 in 4 Americans have nine or more days of paid time off left in October. That's more than most workers can, or will, use by the end of the year. 
While most employees at least want to make the most of those hard-earned days off, American workers use only about half, or 54%, of their eligible vacation time on average, according to a separate study by jobs and recruitment website Glassdoor.
As a result, they end up burning valuable time.
By forfeiting over 200 million vacation days that cannot be rolled over, American workers gave up about $62 billion in lost benefits last year alone. That means employees effectively donated $561 in work time, on average, to their employer."

I can see how that happens, but what a shame. I mean, a lot of people feel like they just don't have anything to do if they took time off. Or they can't afford to "go somewhere" so why bother. Currently, I have 207 hours in sick time accumulated and 134 hours of vacation time. I've been saving my vacation time though, for the epic road trip coming up!! And I'm one of those people who only uses sick time when I'm sick, thus, I've accumulated a lot of it. Next month, my fella has to have shoulder surgery and I can use my sick time to be home with him. That's a nice benefit. Some people, when they retire, have upwards of 3 months of vacation time they haven't used. That's just crazy. If you have that much time on the books, just take every Friday in the summer off. How cool would that be, 3 day weekends all summer long?! Sign me up! I don't necessarily like the use it or loose it policy, but take your time off people! 

Many years ago I worked for a company who had this crazy wicked program...if you didn't use any sick time all year, they threw your name into a hat to win a new car! There were a couple other really great prizes too. One was a cruise and the other was an extra week of vacation. It actually saved the company a boat load of money! We could only accrue 2 weeks of sick time though. A few years ago I read an article about a large employer in Japan who figured out that smokers used an average of 7 days a year on break, smoking. So if you were a nonsmoker, you got and extra 7 days of paid vacation a year. Good incentive to quit smoking. I bet they take all their time off in Japan! (not that any of that has anything to do with what I was talking about)