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

by Bill Perkins

Experiences yield dividends because we humans have memory. We don’t start every day with a blank brain, like characters in so many sci-fi movies. We wake up every morning preloaded with a bunch of memories that we can access at any time—mainly to get around and navigate the world. When you face a large rectangular panel with a protruding round knob, you don’t ask yourself, What is this thing? No, you know it’s a door. And you know how to open that door. So there’s a huge dividend from having once learned what a door is—think of all the doors you can open!

At the high end, retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.8 percent of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. That’s more than 88 percent left over—which means that a person retiring at 65 with half a million dollars still has more than $440,000 left at age 85!

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.

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!

old. So people in these middle years—neither very young nor very old—typically have a different problem: They face a time crunch, especially if they have children at home. This time crunch is their biggest obstacle to having positive life experiences. Not that children don’t bring plenty of positive life experiences—they do—but between changing diapers, driving to various lessons and practices, and taking care of a larger household, there’s just less time for other experiences.

60. People so often talk about saving for retirement. But there are far fewer conversations about saving for excellent and memorable life experiences that need to happen much sooner than the typical retirement age. If you look at the activities that are advertised in retirement commercials—a couple holding hands while strolling on a beautiful beach, a man holding a youngster on his shoulders—you’ll find that you actually want to do most of those things before you’re retired.

There’s a great sense of pride at having pursued an important goal wholeheartedly. If you’ve given something your all, you’ll get a lot of positive memories out of the experience no matter what happens.

But if we could go back in time, I would say: Don’t wait. Do the bold thing now, rather than in retirement, because the go-go years are very short. In general, this whole “I’ll wait to do this when I’m retired” is a massive blunder. But if you’ve already made that blunder, go ahead and make the most of the time you’ve got.