Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

by Bill Perkins

Now think about how much time you spent showing pictures of that trip to your friends back home. Add to that all the times you and the people you traveled with reminisced about that trip, and all the times you’ve thought about it yourself or given advice to other people considering going on a similar trip. All those residual experiences from the original experience are the dividends I’m talking about—they’re your memory dividends, and they add up. In fact, some of these memories, upon repeat reflection, may actually bring more enjoyment than the original experience itself. So buying an experience doesn’t just buy you the experience itself—it also buys you the sum of all the dividends that experience will bring for the rest of your life. This becomes really clear when

Not only that, but the number of actual experiences available to you diminishes as you age. Yes, you need money to survive in retirement, but the main thing you’ll be retiring on will be your memories—so make sure you invest enough in those.

Once you’re in the habit of working for money to live, the thrill of making money exceeds the thrill of actually living.

dance. Just don’t let that money sit and go to waste because of where it came from. The source of your money doesn’t change the calculus on maximizing your life.

The purpose of money is to have experiences, and one of those experiences for your kids is time with you. Therefore, if you are earning money but not having experiences with your kids, you are actually depriving your kids. And yourself.

fun. Friends who are around my age agree: At a certain point, your memories of having played football are a lot more pleasant than playing football.

In a way, the amount of utility that babies get from money is very similar to what the elderly get. Money is nearly worthless at the very beginning and the very end of life.

If someone had told me that by this date my kid would stop wanting to watch the Heffalump movie, I probably would have watched it with her a lot more. Unfortunately, in real life you rarely get an exact date for when you will no longer be able to do something—these things just seem to fade away. And until they’re gone, you don’t give their gradual demise much thought, if any. You just kind of assume that some things will last forever. But of course, they don’t.

That is what I mean when I say that we die many deaths in the course of our lives: The teenager in you dies, the college student in you dies, the single unattached you dies, the version of you that’s a parent of an infant dies, and so on. Once each of these mini-deaths occurs, there’s no going back. Maybe “dies” is a bit harsh, but you get the idea: We all keep moving forward, progressing from one stage or phase of our lives to the next. So much death and doom, I know—but the upside is that we have many

Being aware that your time is limited can clearly motivate you to make the most of the time you do have.

What a sad thought: to slave away at a job and never get the gold.

from that kind of “work enjoyment” and seeing it going unused in your life? As I already said there, optimization doesn’t care where the money comes from—once you get the money, you owe it to yourself to spend it wisely.

Look, if all you want is to have a pile of money at the end, well, I guess that’s your choice. But bear in mind that I have never seen somebody’s total net worth posted on their tombstone.

or ten years. One of the most important times to re-bucket your life is when you’re nearing your net worth peak. Many people at midlife have forgotten what used to bring them fulfillment and have been too busy taking care of careers and children to explore new interests, either. As a result, many people enter retirement with only a vague idea of what they’ll do with all that free time. Or they have some specific ideas—typically trips they want to take—but only for the first year or two. So after a while, they tend to find themselves adrift, feeling aimless and maybe even itching to go back to work, the one place they know they’ll have a built-in sense of purpose, belonging, and accomplishment.