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

by Bill Perkins

We all have to survive, but we all want to do much more than survive: We want to really live.

This book is not about making your money grow—it’s about making your life grow.

Rule No. 1: Maximize your positive life experiences.

Death wakes people up, and the closer it gets, the more awake and aware we become.

Until then, most of us go through life as if we had all the time in the world.

But the sad truth is that too many people delay gratification for too long, or indefinitely.

Living as if your life were infinite is the opposite of taking the long view: It’s terribly shortsighted.

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

I’m trained as an engineer and made my fortune on the strength of my analytical skills, so I see this question as an optimization problem: how to maximize fulfillment while minimizing waste.

some experiences can be enjoyed only at certain times:

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.

you should choose your experiences deliberately and purposefully rather than living life on autopilot, as too many of us do.

“What Good Is Wealth Without Health?”

to get the most out of your time and money, timing matters.

maximizing what they get out of that wealth—including what they can give to their children, their friends, and the larger society now, instead of waiting until they die.

consumption smoothing.

we need to basically transfer money from years of abundance into the leaner years.

couldn’t predict the magnitude of my future earnings. But here’s the thing: I was right to be confident of the direction of my earnings.

important and influential book: Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robins and Joe Dominguez.

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

The book contended that your money represents life energy. Life energy is all the hours that you’re alive to do things—and

I started going around calculating hours needed to buy stuff.

These kinds of calculations—whether with money and time, or food and exercise—help us be more deliberate in our choices,

which ultimately means we’re making better choices than if we act from impulse or out of habit.

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.

experiences actually gain in value over time: They pay what I call a memory dividend,

when we get overwhelmed we go on autopilot, and the result is far from optimal.

nobody would ever try to die with zero if they’re afraid they’ll hit zero before they die.

There are many ways to be suboptimal and only one way to be perfectly optimal.

When you are no longer able to process energy, you will be declared dead and your adventure will be over. This book is about making the most of your adventure before it ends.

My overarching goal is to get you to think about your life in a more purposeful, deliberate manner, instead of simply doing things as you and others have always done them.

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

When I finally went to Europe, at age 30, it was too late: I was already a tad too old and too bougie to stay in youth hostels and hang out with a bunch of 24-year-olds.

make you much more deliberate in your life choices—to use data and reason to figure out what to do.

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.

Carson, the butler of Downton Abbey, “The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end that’s all there is.”

We’re always reliving parts of our lives through memories,

you retire on your memories.

the grasshopper would be better off to save a little—and, yes, the ant would be better off to live a little!