Die with Zero Quotes

“I hope my message has at least jarred you into rethinking the standard and conventional approaches to living one’s life—get a good job, work hard through endless hours, and then retire in your sixties or seventies and live out your days in your so-called golden years. But I still ask you: Why wait until your health and life energy have begun to wane? Rather than just focusing on saving up for a big pot full of money that you will most likely not be able to spend in your lifetime, live your life to the fullest now: Chase memorable life experiences, give money to your kids when they can best use it, donate money to charity while you’re still alive. That’s the way to live life. Remember: In the end, the business of life is the acquisition of memories. So what are you waiting for?”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“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.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Realize that at every moment you have a choice. The choices you make reflect your priorities, so be sure you’re making those choices deliberately.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“What Good Is Wealth Without Health?”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“That is what I mean when I say that we die many deaths in the course of our lives: The teenager in you dies, the college student in you dies, the single unattached you dies, the version of you that’s a parent of an infant dies, and so on. Once each of these mini-deaths occurs, there’s no going back. Maybe “dies” is a bit harsh, but you get the idea: We all keep moving forward, progressing from one stage or phase of our lives to the next.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“When you face asymmetric risk, it makes total sense to be bold, to grab the opportunity at hand. At the extreme, when the downside is very low (or nonexistent, as in the “nothing to lose” case) and the upside is really high, it’s actually riskier not to make the bold move. The downside of not even taking a chance is emotional: potentially a lifetime of regret and wondering What if? The upside of taking a chance always includes emotional benefits—even if things don’t work out. 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.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“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?”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Death wakes people up, and the closer it gets, the more awake and aware we become. 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.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Start thinking more about how you use your limited time, your life energy, and you’ll be well on your way to living the fullest life you possibly can.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end that’s all there is.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Start actively thinking about the life experiences you’d like to have, and the number of times you’d like to have them. The experiences can be large or small, free or costly, charitable or hedonistic. But think about what you really want out of this life in terms of meaningful and memorable experiences.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Research in psychology backs me up: People who spend money on time-saving purchases experience greater life satisfaction, regardless of their income.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“No, the key takeaway, I now realize, is to strike the right balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Nothing has a greater effect on your ability to enjoy experiences—at any age—than your health.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Nothing has a greater effect on your ability to enjoy experiences—at any age—than your health. In fact, health is actually a lot more valuable than money, because no amount of money can ever make up for very poor health—whereas people in good health but with little money can still have many wonderful experiences.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“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.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“In other words, to get the most out of your time and money, timing matters. So to increase your overall lifetime fulfillment, it’s important to have each experience at the right age.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“what’s easy shouldn’t determine what you do. Don’t let difficulty dissuade you from living your best life!”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“To fully enjoy life instead of just surviving it, you need to stop driving mindlessly and actively steer your life the way you want it to go.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“don’t underestimate the risk of inaction. Staying the course instead of making bold moves feels safe, but consider what you stand to lose: the life you could have lived if you had mustered the courage to be bolder.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Or, if your out-of-pocket medical expenses amount to $50,000 per night (as they did for my father’s hospital stay at the end of his life), does it really matter whether you’ve saved $10,000 or $50,000 or even $250,000? No, it doesn’t, because the extra $50,000 will buy you one extra night, a night that might well have taken you a year’s worth of work to earn! Similarly, $250,000 saved over however many years will get wiped out in five days. 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.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“The utility of money changes over time, and it does so in a fairly predictable way: Starting sometime in your twenties, your health very subtly starts to decline, causing a corresponding decline in your ability to enjoy money. Ability to Enjoy Experiences Based on Health Everyone's health declines with age. Wealth, on the other hand, tends to grow over the years as people save up more and more. But worsening health gradually constrains your enjoyment of that wealth as more and more physical activities become impossible to enjoy, no matter how much money you can afford to spend on them.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“the senselessness of indefinitely delayed gratification.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“First of all, yes, you can certainly leave money to the people and causes you care about—but the truth is that those people and causes would be better off getting your wealth sooner rather than later. Why wait until after you die?”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“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! At the lower end, retirees with less than $200,000 saved up for retirement spent a higher percentage (as you might expect, since they had less to spend overall)—but even this group’s median members had spent down only one-quarter of their assets 18 years after retirement.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“If you’re already a billionaire, it’s safe to assume that your children would be better off if you spent at least a little more time with them, even if it’s to the detriment of your career. The financial cost to your career is small, but the benefit to your children is immense. So it’s a net gain to the family, including to you.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Well, buying an annuity means you give the insurance company a lump sum—say, $500,000 at age 60—and in return you get a guaranteed monthly payout (for example, $2,400 each month) for the rest of your life, however long that happens to be. Like all insurance, annuities aren’t free—insurance companies have to make money to stay in business!—but if your goal is to maximize the life experiences you can buy with the money you’ve earned, they’re a very sensible solution. That’s partly because, even after the insurance company’s fees, your monthly payouts amount to more than you would probably be willing to pay yourself if you wanted to make sure you didn’t outlive your money. For example, one popular rule of thumb for retirement spending is the “4 percent rule,” whereby you withdraw 4 percent from your savings each year of retirement. Well, with annuities, your annual payouts will probably amount to more than 4 percent of what you put into the annuity—and, unlike the 4 percent withdrawals, those payouts are guaranteed to continue for the rest of your life.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“Life is not a game of Space Invaders—you don’t get points for all the money you rack up in the game—but many people treat it as though it were. They just keep earning and earning, trying to maximize their wealth without giving nearly as much thought to 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.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“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.” In fact, thinking of annuities as insurance makes them a lot more sensible than thinking of them as investments—because as investments they are not good at all. But that’s not their goal—their goal is to insure you against the risk of outliving your money.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“You might think that as people get older, they spend money more freely out of the sheer desire to make the most of it before it’s truly too late. But the opposite tends to happen. In general, spending among American households declines as people age. For example, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that in 2017, average annual spending for households headed by 55-to-64-year-olds was $65,000; average spending fell to $55,000 for those between 65 and 74; and spending fell again to $42,000 for those 75 and older. This overall decline occurred despite a rise in healthcare expenses, because most other expenses, such as clothing and entertainment, were much lower. The decline in spending over time was even more acute for retirees with more than $1 million in assets, according to separate research conducted by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which analyzed data from more than half a million of its customers.”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life