Odyssey Plan: Three Five-Year Lives, Each With a Price
An Odyssey Plan has you sketch three different versions of your next five years, then rate each one on four gauges. The exercise comes from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’s book Designing Your Life. One of the gauges, Resources, includes money, and that part is easy to answer with a guess. Work out what each plan costs and how many months of saving it takes. In the example below, the wild-card life takes 23 months.
Three lives, priced
Each cost below uses the method on the career change cost page, with two example inputs. Essential expenses come to $3,000 a month before health coverage. The saving rate is $1,000 a month. Health coverage gets its own line, COBRA at about $833 a month (the full premium plus 2%) for any stretch without a paycheck.
| Plan | What it involves | Change fund | Months to save at $1,000 a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Life One: the current path | Stay in the job and go after the next promotion | $0 beyond your emergency cushion | 0 |
| Life Two: the current path is closing | A year of community college classes ($4,210) while the old job lasts, then six months of job hunting with no pay | $27,210 | 28 |
| Life Three: money and image don’t matter | Quit and spend six months on a creative project with no paycheck | about $23,000 | 23 |
Life Two is the worked example on the career change cost page (College Board 2026-27 tuition, KFF 2026 premium). Life Three uses that page’s six job-search months on their own: $3,000 plus about $833, times six. The six months were chosen for the example; they aren’t a research figure.
The wild card costs about $4,210 less than the retraining plan: the same six months without pay, minus the tuition. Those six months are most of Life Two’s bill and all of Life Three’s. Run your own Life Three through the four lines below before you rule it out.
Write the three lives
Each plan covers the same five years. Burnett and Evans frame the three with questions, as summarized in Colorado State University’s guide:
- Life One answers “What’s your current (obvious) option?” It is the plan already in your head.
- Life Two answers “What if option one disappeared?” Picture your field shrinking or your role being cut, with enough warning to plan. In the table, that plan starts while the old job still pays.
- Life Three answers “What if money or image were not relevant?” For a nurse, that might be six months writing a novel.
Don’t make Life Two a weaker copy of Life One. If your current path is nursing, Life Two isn’t a different hospital. Losing option one should push you into another field.
What goes on each plan
The University of Florida’s Life Design guide lists four parts for every plan:
- A visual timeline from year one to year five that includes personal and non-career events. A move, a child starting school or a parent who will need care belongs on it.
- A six-word title that sums up the plan.
- Two or three questions the plan is testing, such as whether you would still like the work at 50 hours a week.
- A dashboard of four gauges: Resources, Likability, Confidence and Coherence.
Put the personal events on the timeline first. A year of classes that starts the semester a baby is due needs a different year one.
The four gauges
In the UF guide, Resources asks whether you have the time, money, skills and contacts to carry the plan out. Likability is how much you want it, rated hot, warm or cold. Confidence is how sure you are that you can pull it off. Coherence asks whether the plan fits together and fits you.
Set Likability, Confidence and Coherence by feel. For Resources, count the money with the steps below before you set it.
How to price a plan
Start from your essential monthly expenses, the bills you’d still have to pay with no income at all. The emergency fund guide has the full list. Then add up four lines for each plan:
- Training or credentials. Use the program’s quoted price for the whole credential, with books and exam fees.
- Months without pay, times your essential expenses. If you’ll have part-time income, subtract it from the monthly figure first.
- Health coverage for those months. COBRA can bill you the full premium plus 2%, so get a Marketplace quote before you choose (details on the career change cost page).
- Anything the plan needs that you don’t own yet, such as a used work truck or a studio deposit.
Divide the total by what you can save each month and round up. That’s how many months of saving the plan needs, and they come out of its five years. Saving can overlap the plan when part of it runs on a paycheck: in the career change cost example, saving starts 16 months before classes and keeps going through the class year. Leave your emergency cushion out of the total.
Reading the results
Set the three dashboards side by side. Where Life Three has the hottest Likability and the weakest Resources, check how many of its five years the saving uses up. In the example, 23 months of saving plus the six-month project come to 29 months, under half the five years.
A plan that needs more money than you can save in five years can change shape before you drop it. Keep the job and take the classes part time, or try the work on weekends for a few months to test the Likability gauge before you commit years of saving to it.
When one plan pulls ahead, open a separate savings account for its change fund. The where to keep your emergency fund page compares savings accounts and Treasury bills for money with a known spending date.