What Die with Zero Gets Right about Spending, Giving, and Enjoying the Ride

I'm not sure how I missed Bill Perkins's 2020 bestseller, Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life. It focuses on two of my current professional obsessions: getting clients to spend more during their Go-Go Years, and finding practical ways to deal with the massive amount of wealth middle-class Americans are sending to future generations.

I must have been in a client meeting, working on a financial plan, or fishing with family and friends.

Better late than never. Perkins's book asks a question many good savers eventually face: at what point do you stop accumulating money and start using it?

This is more of a "why" book than a "how to" book. I'll start with the why, then get practical.

Start with Why

Perkins smacks us in the face with a truth we would rather ignore. Money may compound, but entropy always wins. Our health, energy, and opportunities are being spent whether we acknowledge it or not.

That is the central insight of Die With Zero. The point is not to die broke. It is to convert some of our wealth into meaningful experiences before the opportunity to enjoy them disappears.

Invest in Memory Dividends

The experiences are the point. Pascal may have derided the pursuit of pleasure as licking the earth, but for Perkins life is one big lollipop.

At any point in life, but especially near the end, much of what we have left are our memories. Perkins does not dwell on the fact that some of us may lose those too. The goal is to use money and time to create experiences that pay memory dividends for years.

Perkins is partial to travel with friends and family as the primary generator of memory dividends. I'm not sure that is universal. I derive a disproportionate share of my best memories from work, starting with mowing lawns, welding, using cutting torches, and loading trucks with forklifts in the scorching northern California summer sun at age 13. That line runs all the way through my current 50-hour weeks working with my clients and, of course, my team.

There is another category of happy memories that probably does not belong in a client newsletter.

Expensive meals, first-class flights, and trips with family and friends are fun. But some of my most meaningful memories came from working shoulder to shoulder with my parents when they needed help and focusing intensely on my children when they needed me. Those experiences were not always fun while they were happening. They were meaningful.

Many of us also like our work. It produces experiences we value and, over time, more money than we need to pay for the experiences Perkins emphasizes. We also value the security of the cash cushion we accumulate. That complicates his thesis. But I am not here to pick the book apart.

Put Your Life on the Calendar

Now that I have said this is a why book, let me turn to one of its most useful how-to ideas. Perkins urges us to list the things we want to do and match each one to the stage of life when it is most realistic. Climbing a high mountain at 24 is one thing. Attempting the same multiday climb at 65 is another.

Perkins is a quantitative trader, so he likes to think this stuff can be quantified and optimized. His three factors are time, health, and money. When we are young, we are long on time and health and short on money. That is the time to couch-surf your way to nirvana, buy the Eurail pass, and hit the hostels. Or head to Alaska and pile up cash and memories working the summer season.

If and when children arrive, we run short of time for such youthful pursuits. Once the children are launched, we may have more money, but we probably no longer want to sleep in hostels. We also cannot recover from pickup basketball or football games the way we once did.

You get the point. Windows of opportunity open and close, and they often close earlier than we expect. The practical lesson is to move more spending into our Go-Go Years and, when possible, move some of those experiences forward rather than saving everything for retirement.

Perkins's big point is to know when to stop growing your wealth and start using it. You can probably use more of it, and use it earlier, than you think.

Take the Big Risks Early

This is one claim many of us can agree with in hindsight. If our children and grandchildren will listen, we may even be able to put it to work for them. Take the big risks when you have plenty of time to recover. Shoot for the stars and, if you fail, you still have time to change course and make it to the moon.

My current career is my third and last. When I was recruited away from a comfortable job at a San Francisco think tank to become a Washington-based magazine writer, I faced a new challenge for less money. My father gave me good advice. Go for it if you want to do it, he said. The higher you go, the harder it will be to make a move later.

I took his advice and was soon having more fun at work and making more money to boot. I succeeded in the sense that I did not get fired, even though a large part of my beat involved attending boondoggle events, eating free food, drinking on the cuff, and writing about it.

I failed in another sense. I decided the full-time writing life was not for me, so I took the next big risk and began building a career in financial planning for much less initial income.

That one has worked out.

Alas, for many of us, this is now advice for our progeny. Now back to us.

Know When Enough Is Enough

Most of us will die owning more wealth than we had when we cashed our last paycheck. Perkins thinks this is crazy. He is right if people are postponing life for the "someday" that, as Creedence Clearwater Revival warned us, may never come.

This is not an argument for reckless spending. It is an argument for determining what you can safely spend and then actually spending some of it. As I often say, either you fly first class or your kids will.

There is no way to identify the perfect time or the perfect amount. To do that, you would need to know future market returns, the exact path your health will take and the date when you will assume room temperature.

Financial planning can get us closer. We can calculate a maximum potential spending level, test whether the plan can support it, and identify practical ways to move money out of investment accounts and into the parts of life that matter. A plan should do more than protect you from running out of money. It should also protect you from leaving too much life unlived.

Give with a Warm Hand

By now you can see the theme. Spend early and often. Giving money to others is a form of spending, after all.

This is not a new insight. It is often said that it is better to give with a warm hand than a cold one. That is true for the giver, who gets the pleasure of seeing the gift make a difference. It also allows the giver to observe how the recipient handles the money before making additional gifts.

More to Perkins's point, the money may have a much greater impact when it arrives earlier. Children may benefit more from financial help in their early 30s, when they are buying a home or raising children, than in their late 50s, 60s or even 70s.

The same can be true of charitable gifts. Giving while you are alive allows you to see what the organization does with the money and to enjoy the results yourself.

Spend It while It Still Matters

The goal is not to hit zero on the exact day you die. That would require a level of forecasting unavailable to financial planners, economists, doctors, or anyone else. The goal is to make sure the money serves a purpose while you are still here.

Every dollar you accumulate will eventually be spent by you, your heirs, a charity, or the government. Planning gives you a chance to make that choice deliberately.

Keep a cushion. Take care of the future. Then spend some of the money and enjoy the ride. You can leave your heirs an inheritance. You cannot leave them your unused years.