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

by Bill Perkins

Yet the challenge that their situation presented is common to everyone: Everyone’s health generally declines with time, and sooner or later we all die, so the question we all must answer is how to make the most of our finite time on earth.

The book contended that your money represents life energy. Life energy is all the hours that you’re alive to do things—and whenever you work, you spend some of that finite life energy. So any amount of money you’ve earned through your work represents the amount of life energy you spent earning that money.

I started going around calculating hours needed to buy stuff. I’d see a nice-looking shirt, do the mental math, and think, No, you cannot get me to work two hours just to buy that shirt!

when I look at a cookie, I convert it to time on the treadmill. Sometimes, when I see a cookie that looks good, I’ll take a bite to see how good it tastes and then ask myself, Is eating this cookie worth walking an extra hour on the treadmill?

Start actively thinking about the life experiences you’d like to have, and the number of times you’d like to have them. The experiences can be large or small, free or costly, charitable or hedonistic. But think about what you really want out of this life in terms of meaningful and memorable experiences.

gobbledygook—he

earning and earning while forgetting that your whole point in earning money is to be able to spend it on the experiences that make your life what it is.

But so much of our life is spent on autopilot—we move through the world as if someone else programmed our actions, and we don’t think nearly enough about how to spend our time and money.

To fully enjoy life instead of just surviving it, you need to stop driving mindlessly and actively steer your life the way you want it to go.

it’s easier to live for short-term rewards (myopia) and to stay on autopilot (inertia) than to do what will be good for you in the long term.

The plastic over the couches is a microcosmic example of much of what I’m talking about in this book: the senselessness of indefinitely delayed gratification.

Or, if your out-of-pocket medical expenses amount to $50,000 per night (as they did for my father’s hospital stay at the end of his life), does it really matter whether you’ve saved $10,000 or $50,000 or even $250,000? No, it doesn’t, because the extra $50,000 will buy you one extra night, a night that might well have taken you a year’s worth of work to earn! Similarly, $250,000 saved over however many years will get wiped out in five days.

There’s a big difference between living a life and just being kept alive,

They wouldn’t endorse a certain calculator but instead referred me to their own Web site (soa.org), which mainly provides tools for professional actuaries. There is one very accessible tool their Web site recommends: the Actuaries Longevity Illustrator (http://www.longevityillustrator.org/). Based on your answers to just a few questions, it produces a chart that shows your probabilities of dying at different ages.

One helpful tool is the Living to 100 calculator (https://www.livingto100.com), designed by a doctor and researcher who studies exceptional longevity.

fee-only adviser, someone you pay a flat fee for giving you financial advice. This kind of adviser doesn’t have an incentive to avoid annuities and also doesn’t get paid commissions for selling annuities.

you should be focusing on maximizing your life enjoyment rather than on maximizing your wealth.

some charities, particularly foundations and endowed nonprofits, don’t use the money they receive right away, either; instead, they aim to grow their endowments by taking in more than they give away each year. For example, in 1999, foundations took in more than $90 billion but distributed less than $25 billion. That is why one analysis concludes that “donors should ask not just how, but how soon, their gifts will be used.”

your personal interest rate rises with age, but unfortunately we don’t always act as if it does. If this concept of a personal interest rate works for you, though, then keeping it in mind when you are considering buying an experience can help you decide whether it’s worth it to spend the money now or to save it for another time.

Think of one way in which you can invest your time or your money to improve your health and thereby improve all of your future life experiences.

the day I die and the day I stop being able to enjoy certain experiences are two distinctly different dates.

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.

Her patients’ number one regret was wishing they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves—as opposed to the life that others expected of them. It’s a regret about not pursuing your dreams, and therefore having those dreams go unfulfilled. If you ignore what you truly value in life and instead pursue a path that the rest of your surrounding everyday culture foists upon you, you risk having real regret at the end of your days. In American culture, which so often values hard work and earning money to the exclusion of other important values (such as leisure, adventure, and relationships), it stands to reason that people often come to the end of their days really wishing they hadn’t made this kind of sacrifice.

when something feels abundant and endless, the truth is, we don’t always value it. But the reality, of course, is that the time you get to spend in each phase in your life is not that abundant, and it’s certainly not unlimited.

Instead I could have celebrated my birthday by just looking at my monthly investment savings and IRA statements. But what kind of memory would that be?

survival threshold = 0.7 × (cost to live one year) × (years left to live)

To understand why you should think in terms of a date, not a number, you need to recall that enjoying experiences requires a combination of money, free time, and health. You need all three—money alone is never enough. And for most people, accumulating more money takes time.

More money doesn’t equal more experience points.

I’m not talking about spending money just for the sake of spending the money, either, but to become the fullest and most fulfilled version of Andy that he could be.

Remember, too, to invest in your health, even if you haven’t done much of that in the past. As I explained earlier, your health massively changes your ability to enjoy all kinds of experiences.

When you face asymmetric risk, it makes total sense to be bold, to grab the opportunity at hand. At the extreme, when the downside is very low (or nonexistent, as in the “nothing to lose” case) and the upside is really high, it’s actually riskier not to make the bold move. The downside of not even taking a chance is emotional: potentially a lifetime of regret and wondering What if? The upside of taking a chance always includes emotional benefits—even if things don’t work out. There’s a great sense of pride at having pursued an important goal wholeheartedly.

When you look back from any point during your life, you will remember your actions in a positive light. In other words, even experiences that don’t end the way you’d hoped can still yield positive memory dividends. So being bold is an investment in your future happiness—and therefore another way to maximize the area under the curve.

what’s easy shouldn’t determine what you do. Don’t let difficulty dissuade you from living your best life!