u/JoaoRochaOnReddit

my husband and I are both remote but we work for different companies. different PTO allowances, different public holidays depending on where each employer is based, different use-or-lose deadlines.

when you travel as much as we do the stakes are higher. a day of PTO wasted or a window missed where we were both free feels more painful than it would if we were just office workers who go on one holiday a year.

what actually helped us was sitting down every January and mapping the whole year at once. not booking flights, just mapping. which weeks are we both off at the same time. which long weekends can we turn into something real with 1 extra day each. how many days does each of us have left after the things we already know about. we found a lot more opportunities than we expected once we could actually see it.

the thing I never see anyone talk about is that remote doesn't mean unlimited PTO. you still have a finite number of days and if you don't plan them intentionally they disappear. and if two of you are trying to travel together, coordination matters even more than it does for a traditional couple.

curious how other nomad couples handle this. do you plan the year upfront or figure it out as you go? and if you have different employers, how do you keep track of both your allowances without it becoming a mess?

my husband and I are both working remotely but for companies based in different countries. his follows UK public holidays, mine follows Portuguese ones. so even something as basic as "is this a bank holiday?" has a different answer for each of us.

every January we sit down and map the whole year. which weeks we both have off at the same time, which long weekends we can stretch with just 1 or 2 days, how many days each of us has left in our allowances. it sounds like a lot but it takes about 30 minutes and it means we actually book the trips we want instead of saying "we should do something" all year and then not doing it.

the hardest part is that our public holidays don't overlap cleanly. his company gives him UK bank holidays, I get Portuguese ones. so when I assume we are both off at Christmas it turns out he has an extra day I don't have, or a day in August that doesn't exist in my calendar at all.

curious how other couples with cross-country employment deal with this. do you have a system? do you just communicate as you go? does one of you end up doing all the planning?

We have two kids, 6 and 9. My husband and I both work full time with different employers. Every year we hit the same problem: school holidays come around and we're suddenly trying to figure out who can take which week off, who has more days left, whether the dates even align with our respective companies' busy periods.

Last summer we ended up in a situation where neither of us had planned ahead for the last two weeks of the school holidays. We'd both used a chunk of days earlier in the year on a trip, neither of us had checked what was left, and by August we were suddenly realising the coverage just didn't add up. We ended up cobbling together a solution involving my parents and his and a lot of stress that honestly wasn't necessary if we'd just looked at the calendar in January.

I keep thinking there must be a way to do this more intentionally. Like if we sat down at the start of the year and mapped out all the school holidays, both our PTO allowances, the public holidays, and just figured out who takes what in advance. But every time we try to do it in a shared google calendar it becomes this massive thing with colour codes and tabs and neither of us wants to maintain it.

Do other parents actually have a system for this? I'm genuinely asking because I feel like we're not the only ones winging it but also like everyone else has somehow figured something out that we haven't.

So I was doing my taxes a few weeks ago and I found a note from my employer about unused PTO that expired at the end of the year. 6 days. Gone. I didn't even realise I hadn't used them, I kept thinking "I'll take some time off soon" and then suddenly it was December.

The thing is I do care about this stuff. I track my spending, I use a task manager, I'm generally a reasonably organised person. But for some reason vacation planning never made it into any kind of system. I'd just look at my remaining days sometime in November and panic.

This year I actually sat down in January and tried to plan the whole year out. Like properly, not just a vague "I want to go somewhere in summer." I looked at the bank holidays, figured out which ones fall near weekends so I can take 1 extra day and get a 4 day break, tried to spread things out so I don't end up burnt out by September with nothing left.

It sounds so obvious writing it out but it honestly never occured to me to treat vacation days like a budget. You wouldn't just spend money randomly and hope you don't run out. But thats basically what I was doing with my PTO.

Anyone else do this kind of annual planning thing? I'm curious how other people structure it, whether you use a spreadsheet or just block stuff in your calendar in advance or something else entirely. I feel like there's probably a better way to do this that I'm still not seeing.