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 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 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 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.