vacation time, use your vacation time, Dr. Lois Frankel

While doing research for my book, Nice Girls Don't Get Rich: 75 Avoidable Mistakes Women Make with Money, I was stunned to come upon the following statistics from a survey conducted by Expedia.com:

  • The average American leaves 1.8 days per year of his or her vacation time unused, which means we’re collectively giving back to our employers $19.3 billion and 415 million unused days annually;
  • Executives expected to take 50% fewer vacation days in 2003 than they did the previous year;
  • Americans are taking 10% less vacation time this year than they did last year;
  • Nearly 50% of full-time workers say they are too busy to take vacations;
  • Approximately 40% of those surveyed said they canceled or postponed vacation plans because of work.

You're probably all too familiar with why so much vacation time is left on the table. The reasons range from "I don't want to look bad to the boss," to "I know the work will only pile up, so I can't relax anyway." What you may not know is that a 20-year study by the Framingham Heart Study found that women who took two or more vacations a year cut their chance of a fatal heart attack in half, as compared with women who took no vacation. Similarly, men who took frequent vacations were 32% less likely to die from heart disease and 17% less likely to die from other causes than those who rarely took vacations.