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 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.