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

by Bill Perkins

Maximize your positive life experiences.

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

indigent

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

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.”

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.

So every time you remember the original experience, you get an additional experience from mentally and emotionally reliving the original experience. The recollection may bring you just a tiny fraction of the enjoyment that the original experience did,

I went on: “But if you’re just going to buy the property and have it sit there doing nothing but appreciating your capital investment, then who cares if you stand to gain an extra 3 percent on it? There is nothing special or life-changing about earning 3 percent on foreign real estate—it’s just one of a million types of investments you could make. That extra 3 percent is especially insignificant when you start at age 50, as compared with starting much earlier. Investing in experiences, on the other hand, really could change your life, even at 50.”

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.

not respecting the million plus dollhairs it takes to retire.

But when you’re young, healthy, and unjaded, you can get a huge amount of enjoyment even from experiences that don’t cost a lot. (Remember my friend Jason, who had the experience of a lifetime while staying in cheap hostels and eating baguettes in the park.)

cmon bro that's selective. dude took out a loan from a loan shark it wasn't cheap.

Or how much of your own town there is to see and explore on foot or by public transportation. Most of us aren’t taking anywhere near full advantage of these opportunities for free or virtually free enjoyment. I know I don’t—do you?

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.

let’s assume Elizabeth spends exactly $32,000 each year of retirement, or just shy of $1,000 less than she did when she was working. (Again, for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that the return on her retirement investments exactly matches the annual rise in the cost of living.) With that assumption, her savings will last a little more than 24 years ($770,000 divided by $32,000 per year). But Elizabeth doesn’t live another 24 years: She dies at 85, or 20 years after she left the workforce. As a result, she leaves behind $130,000.

fallacious to talk about bread like you have access to it all at once.

Splurge on private lessons with the best dance teachers if that’s what you value, or hire someone to clean your place so you have more time to pursue dance. Just don’t let that money sit and go to waste because of where it came from. The source of your money doesn’t change the calculus on maximizing your life.

clearly, people who, back in their working years, would have said they were saving up for retirement are not actually spending those retirement savings once they reach retirement.

Some of them appear to not even aim to die with zero; this is especially clear when you look at people with pensions. Pensioners could dip more deeply into their savings than anyone, since their guaranteed income for life assures them they will never starve. But, interestingly, pensioners spend down the lowest percentage of their wealth, probably because, as the data shows, that they had more wealth to begin with.

This never made sense to me: Why spend all this money on furniture that you don’t get to enjoy? The plastic over the couches is a microcosmic example of much of what I’m talking about in this book: the senselessness of indefinitely delayed gratification.

I’m not suggesting that you should rack up large hospital costs with a plan to then stiff the hospital on those bills. What I’m saying is that you can’t pay your way out of high-priced end-of-life medical care; since uninsured medical care is so expensive, it won’t make any real difference for the vast majority of us whether we save for it or not. Either the government will pay for it or you will die.

it is much smarter to spend your healthcare money on the front end (to maintain your health and try to prevent disease) than to spend it at the end, when you get a lot less bang for every buck you spend.

If you don’t want to hear it from me, listen to Ron Lieber, The New York Times’ “Your Money” columnist. “The insurance companies that create annuities often make them seem like investments,” he wrote in a recent explainer about annuities. “But really they’re more like insurance.” Lieber went on: “Like insurance to stave off financial disaster, an annuity is something you purchase to guarantee that you won’t run out of money if you live a long time.”

But 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 adviser doesn’t have an incentive to avoid annuities and also doesn’t get paid commissions for selling annuities. Great—no conflicts of interest in either direction.

I know it may sound morbid and it might make you uncomfortable, but 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, and I have been urging all my friends to do the same.

The 26-to-35 age range combines the best of all these considerations—old enough to be trusted with money, yet young enough to fully enjoy its benefits.

If you really think through the implications of saying that your legacy consists of experiences with your children, the conclusion you reach might be somewhat radical: That is, once you have enough money to take care of your family’s basic needs, then by going to work to earn more money, you might actually be depleting your kids’ inheritance because you are spending less time with them!

As long as what they do is consistent with what they actually want, I have to respect their decision even if it’s not the decision I would have made. There’s just no accounting for taste.

Think, for example, of the amazing gift Robert F. Smith gave to the class of 2019 of Morehouse College, paying off all their student loans. Whatever his motives were, whatever amount his gift added up to, the point is that Smith didn’t put it in his will—he gave while he was still very much alive, enabling today’s graduates to leave college debt-free.

If you have the money now to invest in a new business, and your whole point of investing in the business is to earn money for charity, you and the charity would both be better off if you just gave them your money right now—even if it’s less than what you might be able to give later. The suffering is happening now, so the time to start relieving it is now, not at some distant date in the future.

Consider at what ages you want to give money to your children, and how much you want to give. The same goes with giving money to charity. Discuss these issues with your spouse or partner. And do it today!

And when you have many years of rising income ahead of you, it really doesn’t make sense to save 20 percent of your income. That would mean forgoing memorable life experiences you could be having, and it also means working to pay for a richer future self—a suboptimal use of your life energy, that’s for sure.

Oversimplification.

As I mentioned earlier, if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, you’d spend today one way, and if it was two days from now, you would spend today slightly differently—because you’ll still have tomorrow.

This made me think about feven.

White females, for example, have lower bone density in their hips than do black females, and both groups have lower bone density than black males do. But all groups show a decline with age.

why people who spend money to save time are happier: Using time-saving services reduced time pressure, they found, and reduced time pressure improved the day’s mood. If done repeatedly, such daily mood lifts improve overall life satisfaction.

corollary

Likewise, but for reasons of my own inevitable aging, there will eventually be a last time I ever go wave-running, and a last time I play in a poker tournament, and a last time I’ll be able to board a plane and fly somewhere exotic.

thos why i can't support the travel shit.

And when people say they regret working so hard, they are not talking about the hard work of raising children; they are talking about working to make a living to pay the bills and, as a result, missing “their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.”

yeah partnership sounds like a blast. dates are experiences for memory dividends.

Being aware that your time is limited can clearly motivate you to make the most of the time you do have.

Here’s what I suggest you do. Draw a timeline of your life from now to the grave, then divide it into intervals of five or ten years. Each of those intervals—say, from age 30 to 40, or from 70 to 75—is a time bucket, which is just a random grouping of years. Then think about what key experiences—activities or events—you definitely want to have during your lifetime.

So let’s capture all of this in one basic formula for calculating your survival threshold: survival threshold = 0.7 × (cost to live one year) × (years left to live)

For most people, the optimal net worth peak occurs at some point between the ages of 45 and 60.

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.

Trust me—it’s really not that hard to spend a lot of money doing things you love. But you do have to take some time to first consciously figure out what those appealing expenditures are for you.

Using himself as an example of this idea, the behavioral economist Meir Statman has said that he finds travel by business class worth every penny—but doesn’t feel that way about fine dining at all. “I can afford a $300 meal, but it makes me feel stupid—like the chef is in the back laughing uproariously.” The point is that what you spend money on is up to you.

It’s amazing to me that people will root themselves and not seek any new life adventure because they are fearful of moving away from two or three people; if you do that, it’s like letting those two or three people choose where you live.

It’s not that you shouldn’t care about maintaining relationships. It’s that if you think about the problem rationally, you might discover that you can have the adventure and still maintain wonderful relationships, in addition to making new friends where you go.

When I hear something like that, I ask a couple of questions. One is: How much time do you spend with these people? Often it’s not that much time at all, because we tend to take for granted what is readily available.

I’ll admit I had my own stereotypes about Texas, or anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line, really—especially as a black person.

We had so many arguments about that—so-called job security—her saying that a government job gave you a guarantee, a big measure of safety. I always wanted the opposite—to try to lasso the moon. I figured that if the post office was always hiring, and provided a safe income, I could always go work there if all else failed; but there’s no need to start there.

By aiming to die with zero, you will forever change your autopilot focus from earning and saving and maximizing your wealth to living the best life you possibly can.

Having well-thought-out ideas is one thing, but converting those ideas into a convincing, easy-to-read book is another. For that I would need to work with a writer who could take my words, stories, and explanations and shape them into a flowing, easy-to-read text while retaining my voice, style, and passion.

Bro ain't write his own book.

strident.