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

by Bill Perkins

When the end is near, we suddenly start thinking, What the hell am I doing? Why did I wait this long? Until then, most of us go through life as if we had all the time in the world.

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.

Unlike material possessions, which seem exciting at the beginning but then often depreciate quickly, experiences actually gain in value over time: They pay what I call a memory dividend,

Since the reward of processing energy is the experiences that you get to choose, it stands to reason that the way to make the most of your life is to maximize the number of these life experiences—particularly positive ones.

wtf?

The main idea here is that your life is the sum of your experiences.

no

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

uhm... no

If you were to put a numerical value on each experience, you could then actually add up the value of multiple experiences. Doing that makes it possible to compare bundles of disparate experiences, which is a step toward maximizing your lifetime fulfillment.

dumb

If you die with $1 million left, that’s $1 million of experiences you didn’t have.

the kind of bs this book throws at you

But the next time I visited, all the plastic was back on, and it stayed on for the rest of my grandmother’s life. This never made sense to me: Why spend all this money on furniture that you don’t get to enjoy?

Since many people are fearful of running out of money before they pass on, there is one product that they should definitely look into. These products are called income annuities (or simply annuities).

experts have long wondered why more people don’t buy annuities—a question economists call “the annuity puzzle.”

let’s assume you are working with a fee-only adviser, someone you pay a flat fee for giving you financial advice.

This kind of blanket denial explains why so many people are willing to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to prolong life for just a few more weeks. Think about it: That’s money that they spent years or decades working hard for. They gave up years of their life while healthy and vibrant to buy a few extra weeks of life when they are sick and immobile. If that’s not irrational, I don’t know what is!

I’ve actually started using an app called Final Countdown that counts down the days (and years, months, weeks, and so on) before my estimated death date,

This is the problem with inheritances: You’re leaving too much to chance.

you will figure out what you want to give—and you will give it well before you die.

but age 60 is worse than 50, and 50 is worse than 40. Why? Because a person’s ability to extract real enjoyment out of the gift declines with their age.

I’m assuming that your goal in life is not to maximize your income and wealth but to maximize your lifetime fulfillment, which comes from experiences and your lasting memories of those experiences.

So many people tell themselves that they are working for their kids—they just blindly assume that earning more money will benefit their kids.

Does your work add to your legacy—or does it actually serve to deplete it?

Whether the money or time you’re giving is to children, to charity, or to yourself, the key concept is the same: There is an optimal time, and it is never when you’re dead.

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.”

When it comes to giving money to your kids, the optimal time, as I suggested earlier in the chapter, is when they’re between 26 and 35—not

and destroy their ambition?

Feeney, who made his fortune as a founder of Duty Free Shoppers Group (the duty-free stores you see in airports), is a great role model for what I’m advocating: He started giving his money away (anonymously) early, and by the time he was in his eighties he had given away more than $8 billion of his wealth.

the serene and beautiful Caribbean island of St. Barts,