About the 2-month absentee loss of rank...never heard of it.
I'm thinking there are two possible motivations for this:
-To strongly encourage a consistant commitment to training.
-To make money.

both motivations still don't make sense, since commitment by a student cannot be artificialy enforced. and people are less likely to re-start training if they need to leave for medical, mental health, family needs, giving birth, school, army reserve commitments, extended vacation, etc.

??

Nice one oldman.
I say the Inst. keeps training, thus going up in rank. In the time it took to take his students from whit to red, you would think he could advance one dan right? He would of course slow down in his rate of earning higher rank as he went, but so would his students. I teach nearly 3 hours away from our home school, but I continue training and reporting back to my instructor and I can still advance in rank as I advance in knowledge and such. Of course if I only had a few thousand dollars or so, I could buy myself a master rank or one of those multicolored belts! I don't know, maybe I'll just make up my own rank and claim to be the only registered plaid belt in the world. Anyone wanna buy your way into sharing this honor for a small one-time fee?