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

by Bill Perkins

What I am an advocate for is deciding what makes you happy and then converting your money into the experiences you choose.

Recommendation 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.

The main idea here is that your life is the sum of your experiences. This just means that everything you do in life—all the daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences you have—adds up to who you are.

“The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end that’s all there is.”

experience that experience, often more than once. You might hear a favorite

Your own income might be higher or lower than the ones in any of these examples. It doesn’t matter, because the conclusion is still the same: If you don’t want to squander your life energy, you should aim to spend all your money before you die.

In general, spending among American households declines as people age.

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.

So am I telling you to go plunk down all your savings in an annuity? No, of course not. But what I am saying is that there exist solutions to the problem of how to die with zero without running out of money, and you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t at least look into them.

So always keep this end goal in mind. Make “maximize total life enjoyment” your mantra, using it to guide every decision—including what to focus on with your financial adviser.

It starts with tracking your health so you know when to start spending more than you are earning (when to crack open your nest egg). It also means knowing your projected death date and your annual cost of just staying alive, because those two numbers together tell you the bare minimum amount you will need between now and the end of your life.

Is each additional hour of work you do really worth it to you and your children? Does your work add to your legacy—or does it actually serve to deplete it?

Nothing has a greater effect on your ability to enjoy experiences—at any age—than your health.

Eat to Live, by Joel Fuhrman, M.D.