Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life
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Syntopical readingThe goal is
Rule 2: Start investing
Rule 2: Start investing in experiences early.
Your life is the sum of your experiences. This just means that everything you do in life—all the daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences you have—adds up to who you are.
“Buying an experience doesn’t just buy you the experience itself—it also buys you the sum of all the dividends that experience will bring for the rest of your life.”
Invest in your life’s experiences—and start early, start early, start early.
Rule 4: Use all
Rule 4: Use all available tools to help you die with zero.
If you’re nervous about someday running out of money before you die, then spend some time looking at annuities as a possible solution.
The plan is to avoid running out of money—how not to outspend your savings. But of course that’s just one half of the question of how to die with zero; the other half is how not to waste your life energy by underspending.
Money has absolutely no value to you when you’re dead.
Dying with zero is not only about money: It’s also about time. 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.
Rule 7: Think of
Rule 7: Think of your life as distinct seasons.
Time buckets are a simple tool for discovering what you want your life to look like in broad strokes.
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.
This list is the opposite of the so-called bucket list, which is typically a single accounting of all the things you hope to do before you ‘kick the bucket,’ so to speak.
About the author:Called the
About the author:
Called the “Last Cowboy” of hedge funds by the Wall Street Journal, Bill Perkins is considered one of the most successful energy traders in history. He’s reported to have generated more than $1 billion for his previous firm during a five-year period.
Rule 8: Know when
Rule 8: Know when to stop growing your wealth.
You should find that one special point in your life when your net worth is the highest it will ever be. I call that point your net worth peak, or just ‘your peak.’
Traditionally, people continue to increase their net worth until they stop working, and are afraid to dip much into their principal even after retirement. But to make the most of your hard-earned money, you must crack open your nest egg earlier (starting to spend down your savings sometime between 45 and 60 for most people) so that you end, theoretically, with zero.
Rule 1: Maximize your
Rule 1: Maximize your positive life experiences.
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.
Maximizing your fulfillment from experiences—by planning how you will spend your time and money to achieve the biggest peaks you can with the resources you have—is how you maximize your life.
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.
Rule 3: Aim to
Rule 3: Aim to die with zero.
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. There is just no way to get those hours back.
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.
Rule 9: Take your
Rule 9: Take your biggest risks when you have little to lose.
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.
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.
In the end, the business of life is the acquisition of memories.
About the book:Die with
About the book:
Die with Zero presents a startling new and provocative philosophy as well as practical guide on how to get the most out of your money—and out of your life. It’s intended for those who place lifelong memorable experiences far ahead of simply making and accumulating money for one’s so-called “golden years.”
In short, Bill Perkins wants to rescue you from over-saving and under-living. Regardless of your age, Die with Zero will teach you Perkins’s plan for optimizing your life, stage by stage, so you’re fully engaged and enjoying what you’ve worked and saved for.
Rule 5: Give money
Rule 5: Give money to your children or to charity when it has the most impact.
A person’s ability to extract real enjoyment out of the gift declines with their age.
When it comes to giving money to your kids, the optimal time is when they’re between 26 and 35—not too late to make a big impact and not so soon that they might squander the money.
But what about giving money to charity? With charity, there’s no such thing as too soon.
Maximize your life experiences. So spend your money while you’re alive—whether it’s on yourself, your loved ones, or charity.
And beyond that, find the optimal times to spend money.
Rule 6: Don’t live
Rule 6: Don’t live your life on autopilot.
Think about your current physical health: What life experiences can you have now that you might not be able to have later?
Think of one way in which you can invest your time or your money to improve your health and thereby improve all of your future life experiences.
The key takeaway is to strike the right balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.
The other big opportunity I see for creating a more balanced life is to exchange money for free time—a tactic that usually has the most impact in one’s middle years, when you have more money than time.