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

by Bill Perkins

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.

That was when I realized that 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.

We do make some conscious choices—to some extent, we choose our jobs, our hobbies, our relationships, our vacation destinations. 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.

For some people, it can be the same with working for money—it is just easier to keep doing what you’ve been doing, especially when what you’ve been doing continues to reward you with society’s universal form of recognition for a job well done, aka money.

That’s because for every additional day you spend working, you sacrifice an equivalent amount of free time, and during that time your health gradually declines, too.

Our culture’s focus on work is like a seductive drug. It takes all of your yearning for discovery and wonder and experiences, promising to give you the means (money) to get all those things—but the focus on the work and the money becomes so single-minded and automatic that you forget what you were yearning for in the first place.

People are more afraid of running out of money than wasting their life, and that’s got to switch. Your biggest fear ought to be wasting your life and time, not Am I going to have x number of dollars when I’m 80?