Die With Zero

The argument

Bill Perkins is an energy trader, hedge fund manager and poker player. His book has one claim: the purpose of money is to buy life experiences, and most people get the timing wrong. They save through their healthiest years, then die with money unspent or spend it on care in years when they can enjoy little. He calls that wasted life energy, a term he borrows from Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. Every dollar you do not use represents hours of your life you gave away for nothing.

He is not arguing against saving. He is arguing against saving without a plan to spend. The book sets out nine rules, from maximizing positive experiences to taking the biggest risks early, and the sections below follow them.

Perkins uses his own early career as the cautionary tale. At 21 he earned a small salary as a screen clerk on Wall Street and saved a large share of it. His boss told him he was wasting his twenties, because his earning power would grow and the experiences he was skipping would not come back. A friend, Jason, borrowed money to backpack across Europe for months. Perkins stayed home to save. Decades later Jason still draws on those memories, and Perkins still regrets not going.

The memory dividend

The core idea is that experiences pay out twice. You enjoy them once, and then you enjoy remembering them, retelling them and letting them shape who you are. Perkins calls the second payout the memory dividend. Like a financial dividend it compounds: an experience at 25 pays dividends for 60 years, while the same experience at 75 pays for a few.

This changes the math of spending. Investing in experiences early is not indulgence. It is buying an asset with a long payout. Perkins calls the units of enjoyment experience points and argues that your job is to maximize the total over a lifetime, not to maximize the bank balance at the end.

He retells the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. The ant works all summer and survives the winter. But what, he asks, did the ant live for. The answer in his book is that the right amount of work is the amount that funds the experiences you want, and no more.

Health, money and time never line up

Perkins describes life as three resources that peak at different times. In your twenties you have health and free time but little money. In middle age you have health and money but little time. In old age you have money and time but failing health. He draws a health-money-time picture and argues that the best years for expensive, physical experiences are when health and money overlap, roughly your thirties to fifties.

His practical rule is that money should buy back the scarce resource of the moment. When you are young, that means spending on experiences you can still physically do, and borrowing time from the future by working less. In middle age, it means paying for time: a cleaner, a shorter commute, help with chores. In old age, the limiting factor is health, and he advises spending to protect it early rather than paying for care late.

He is blunt about the decline. Most retirement spending falls after 70 not because people are frugal but because they can no longer do the things that cost money. He borrows the retirement planning labels for the go-go years, the slow-go years and the no-go years. Money planned for the no-go years is money that buys little.

Time buckets and seasons

To plan around the decline, Perkins proposes time buckets. Draw a timeline from now to your expected death. Divide it into five- or ten-year intervals. For each interval, list the experiences you want: a long hike, a child's first trip abroad, a year living in another country, a marathon, learning an instrument. Then look at which bucket each experience belongs in, given what your body and obligations will allow.

The exercise shows two things. Some experiences have a closing window: you cannot ski at 80 or take a toddler to the beach at 50. And some buckets are overloaded while others are empty. Most people pile everything into retirement, which is the bucket with the least health.

This is his sixth and seventh rule in practice: do not live on autopilot, and think of life as distinct seasons. The question to ask about any experience is not whether you can afford it but whether this is the last season in which it is possible.

The die-with-zero rule and its objections

The title rule says to plan to spend everything by the time you die. Perkins knows the objections and spends a chapter on them.

What if I run out of money? He answers with tools. Use a life expectancy calculator to estimate how long you have. Buy an annuity to convert a lump sum into guaranteed income for life, which removes the risk of outliving your savings. Buy long-term care insurance for the catastrophic case. He gives a rough survival threshold: multiply your annual cost of living by the years you have left and by about 0.7, because spending falls with age. Above that number, extra savings are buying nothing.

What about my children? He argues that waiting to leave an inheritance is the worst way to help them. Most heirs receive their inheritance around age 60, when they need it least. Give instead when it changes their lives, which he puts between about 26 and 35: a deposit on a home, a career change, help with grandchildren. He calls it the sweet spot for giving.

What about charity? The same logic. A cause needs the money now, and giving now lets you see the effect. A bequest helps after you are gone and after years in which the money did nothing.

The rule is less about hitting exactly zero and more about intention. Dying with a large estate, he argues, means you worked years you did not need to work.

The net-worth peak and the biggest risks

Most personal finance advice tells people to keep growing their wealth. Perkins's eighth rule is to know when to stop. He argues that net worth should peak at a point in time, not at a number, and that for most people that point falls between about 45 and 60. After it, you should spend down on purpose, because each remaining year of health is worth more than another year of accumulation.

He uses the example of a friend, a successful trader, who said he would quit once he had a certain fortune, then kept raising the target. Perkins's point is that goals set as numbers move. Goals set as experiences do not.

The peak is personal. Someone who loves their work peaks later. Someone whose work is only for money peaks as early as their survival threshold allows. The failure mode is never deciding, which is how people arrive at 70 with the savings of a 45-year-old and the body of a 70-year-old.

The ninth rule is that risk should front-load. At 25 the downside of a failed venture is a few lost years and some debt. At 55 it is a lost retirement. So the time for the bold move, the startup, the move abroad or the career switch, is when there is little to lose and decades to recover. Perkins draws on his poker experience: the size of the bet should match the odds and the bankroll, and a young person's bankroll of time is large.

He also argues against fear of regret in the other direction. People regret the risks they did not take more than the ones that failed.

The book closes with Perkins's own experiment. For his 45th birthday he spent a large sum on a week-long party for friends and family. He treats it as the memory dividend in action: the money is gone, and the shared memory keeps paying.

What the critics say

Personal finance writers and reviewers have raised two objections. The plan assumes a stable, high income: someone who can buy an annuity and still fund a decade of travel has options that most readers do not. And it understates long-term care. Costs at the end of life are hard to predict and can be large, and running out of money at 85 has consequences a 30-year-old cannot undo. Perkins answers with insurance and annuities, but critics note that he gives little detail and that both products are expensive for people of modest means. Reviewers also note that the book speaks mainly to readers who already have more than enough, and that its examples, such as a week-long birthday party for friends and family, sit far from most household budgets.

Who should read it

Read it if you are a diligent saver who has never written down what the savings are for, or if you are past 45 and still adding to a retirement fund without a plan to spend it. It is less useful if your income is unstable or your main worry is covering the basics.