Figuring Out How to Use Left Over Vacation Days in December

There are 26 days left in 2013 and a lot of workers are scrambling to use up those saved vacation days for the year.

In my experience, there are a couple of different vacation policies for different companies:

1. Use 'em or lose 'em - You get X number of vacation days per year, if you don't use them, you lose them.
2. Carry over - You get X number of vacation days per year, but you can carry over the days that you don't use to the next year. So, if you get 15 days a year and only use 7, next year you'll have 22.
3. A combination of the two - this is our company policy - you have X number of days per year, and you can carry over X number of days. So, if you have 15 days per year and you can carry over 5, if you use 10 this year, next year you'll have 20. But, if you only use 7, you're still only allowed to carry over 5, so you end up losing 3.

At this point in the year, people who have companies that use policies #1 or #3 may be scrambling to try to schedule days so they don't end up losing vacation time.

But of course many businesses will only let so many employees take vacation all at the same time, so you may be racing with your co-workers to schedule those days off before someone else calls dibs on those days.

Are you stuck trying to figure out what to do with paid time off as the end of the year quickly approaches?