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

by Bill Perkins

thriving, not just surviving.

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Rule No. 1: Maximize your positive life experiences.

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When the end is near, we suddenly start thinking, What the hell am I doing? Why did I wait this long?

What do you see yoursef doing if you found out you had limited time?

so the question we all must answer is how to make the most of our finite time on earth.

Although we all have at least the potential to make more money in the future, we can never go back and recapture time that is now gone. So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.

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

“What Good Is Wealth Without Health?” In other words, to get the most out of your time and money, timing matters. So to increase your overall lifetime fulfillment, it’s important to have each experience at the right age.

It’s called consumption smoothing. Our incomes might vary from one month or one year to another, but that doesn’t mean our spending should reflect those variations—we would be better off if we evened out those variations. To do that, we need to basically transfer money from years of abundance into the leaner years. That’s one use of savings accounts.

Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robins and Joe Dominguez.

A higher salary doesn’t always mean more actual income on an hourly basis.

Your Life Is the Sum of Your Experiences

Many psychological studies have shown that spending money on experiences makes us happier than spending money on things.

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“Do you have fears of running out of money?” I said, “I hope I run out of money!” He gave me a puzzled look. So I went into my whole spiel about wanting a life full of experiences, and how I won’t be able to use my money when I’m dead or too old for many experiences, and that therefore I should aim to die with zero.

Yes, I want you to plan for your future—but never in such a way that you forget to enjoy the present.

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.

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Rule No. 2: Start investing in experiences early.

What experiences have you investe early in? Mine is music

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. When you look back on your life, the richness of those experiences will determine your judgment of how full a life you’ve led.

Do you feel like youve lived a full life? I say yes for me

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

you retire on your memories. When you’re too frail to do much of anything else, you can still look back on the life you’ve lived and experience immense pride, joy, and the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia.

that our culture tends to overemphasize the virtues of the ant—of hard work and delayed gratification—at the cost of other virtues.

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realize that a few factors are in your control, and one of the biggest is how much time at each age you devote to earning money versus having enjoyable experiences.

When you spend time or money on experiences, they are not only enjoyable in the moment—they pay an ongoing dividend, the memory dividend

Experiences yield dividends because we humans have memory.

Think back to one of the best vacations you ever had, and let’s say it lasted a full week. Now think about how much time you spent showing pictures of that trip to your friends back home.

What is your best vacay?

whenever you interact with someone, sharing an experience you’ve had, that is an experience in itself. You’re communicating, laughing, bonding, giving advice, helping them, being vulnerable—you’re doing the stuff of everyday life. By having experiences, you not only live a more engaged and interesting life yourself, but you also have more of yourself to share with others.

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.

Important!

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.

Important!

Warren Buffett says: Invest early, and by the time you get to a certain age, look at how much you’ve accumulated.

I’m trying to grow the richest life I can; and when I say rich, I mean rich in experiences, in adventures, in memories—rich in all the reasons you acquire money.

Important!

So when you’re young and cash poor, my advice is to explore all the free or nearly free experiences you can have.

Making deliberate choices about how to spend your money and your time is the essence of making the most of your life energy.

Rule No. 3: Aim to die with zero.

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.

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

If you spend hours and hours of your life acquiring money and then die without spending all of that money, then you’ve needlessly wasted too many precious hours of your life.

If you don’t want to squander your life energy, you should aim to spend all your money before you die.

if you know when you will die, you must die with zero—because if you don’t, you are not getting maximum enjoyment (utility) from your money.

To be safe but still avoid needlessly leaving money behind, just think of the maximum age to which anyone can live. So a rational person, in Modigliani’s view, will spread their wealth across all the years up to the oldest age to which they might live.

people who save tend to save too much for too late in their lives. They are depriving themselves now just to care for a much, much older future self—a future self that may never live long enough to enjoy that money.

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there is a sweet spot in everyone’s lifetime during which they can most enjoy the fruits of their wealth. The problem is that people continue to save well past that optimal point.

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people’s overall expenses decline with age, even counting the cost of healthcare.

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

You won’t be able to avert every possible illness, no matter what you do, but you can make some health problems a lot less likely—and you’ll enjoy better quality of life all along the way.

long-term care insurance.

I have this

Rule No. 4: Use all available tools to help you die with zero.

just don’t tell me you have no idea how long you’ll live,

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annuities protects you against the risk of dying too old (outliving your savings).

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.

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the more risk you are willing to take, the less of your life energy you’re likely to waste working for money you won’t ever get to spend.

Make “maximize total life enjoyment” your mantra,