58 pages • 1 hour read
Bill PerkinsDie With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Experiences and Memories
In Die With Zero, Perkins presents a perspective on financial planning that centers on the acquisition of meaningful experiences rather than the accumulation of wealth. Perkins argues that experiences, particularly those obtained at the appropriate stages of life, create lasting value through memories that continue to provide fulfillment long after the initial event. The concept of experiences as investments with ongoing returns forms the philosophical foundation of his approach to life optimization, challenging conventional financial wisdom that prioritizes saving over strategic spending.
Experiences gain unique value through their timing, as Perkins illustrates through his friend’s European backpacking adventure. When describing his missed opportunity to travel in his twenties, Perkins reflects, “When I finally went to Europe at age 30, it was too late; I was already a tad too old and too bougie to stay in youth hostels and hang out with a bunch of 24-year-olds” (21). This anecdote demonstrates a fundamental principle of experience acquisition—certain experiences can only be fully appreciated within specific life stages due to physical capabilities, social dynamics, and personal circumstances. The backpacking story serves as a cautionary tale about the consequences of delaying experiences until a theoretically “better” financial position, only to discover that the optimal window for that particular experience has closed. Physical limitations, increased responsibilities, and shifting preferences all contribute to these closing windows of opportunity, making the timing of experiences a critical factor in their value.
Perkins introduces the concept of “memory dividends” to quantify the ongoing value derived from experiences. This framework transforms experiences into investments with measurable returns that accumulate over time, creating an economic rationale for prioritizing experiences over material possessions. Unlike physical assets that typically depreciate, memories appreciate through reflection and sharing, generating continuous returns without additional investment. The elegance of this concept lies in its quantification of something typically considered intangible, allowing for more objective decision-making about resource allocation across a lifetime.
The text establishes experiences as the primary currency of a well-lived life, positioning them as the fundamental units of fulfillment. Perkins states his investment philosophy succinctly: “Invest in your life’s experiences—and start early, start early, start early” (35). This repetition emphasizes the compounding effect of experiences acquired early in life, which maximize the potential for memory dividends through decades of recollection. Experiences become the central measurement of wealth in this paradigm, replacing financial metrics with experiential ones. The passage about his friend’s European adventure reinforces this value system, noting that “the pictures and stories of his experiences showed that he was infinitely richer for having gone” (20). This reframing of wealth in terms of experiences rather than assets constitutes a profound shift in how success and fulfillment are measured, emphasizing qualitative richness over quantitative accumulation.
The prioritization of experiences over material wealth represents a fundamental reorientation of life priorities. As Perkins explicitly states, “This book is not about making your money grow, it’s about making your life grow” (i). This principle redirects focus from financial metrics to experiential ones, establishing a new paradigm for evaluating success and fulfillment. The emphasis on experiences creates a more intentional and purpose-driven approach to both earning and spending, ensuring that financial decisions support rather than hinder the acquisition of meaningful life experiences.
Challenging Societal Narratives About Saving and Spending
Perkins directly confronts the deeply entrenched societal narratives that guide conventional approaches to saving and spending. He argues that these narratives, which often go unquestioned, lead individuals to accumulate wealth well beyond their lifetime needs, effectively wasting both money and precious life energy. The book challenges the conventional wisdom that maximizing savings and minimizing spending represents responsible financial behavior, instead proposing that optimal financial planning should maximize life enjoyment rather than wealth accumulation.
Perkins challenges the autopilot mentality that governs many financial decisions, highlighting how this passive approach leads to suboptimal outcomes. “Staying on autopilot is easy. That’s why we use it. But if you’re trying to live a full and optimal life rather than just taking the path of least resistance, autopilot won’t give you what you want,” Perkins observes (39). The text identifies several forms of financial autopilot, each creating its own type of wasted life energy. Society rewards the habit of working for money with universal recognition for a job well done, reinforcing these patterns despite their diminishing returns on life satisfaction. Perkins shows that even those who recognize the diminishing utility of additional wealth often continue in wealth-accumulation mode far longer than rational analysis would suggest is beneficial.
The conventional narrative of precautionary saving receives particular scrutiny, as Perkins questions the rationale behind saving for catastrophic end-of-life medical expenses. “To me, that’s like going out and buying something silly, like alien robot invasion insurance,” he argues, suggesting that such extreme precautionary saving represents an irrational response to uncertainty (57). Data from the Employee Benefit Research Institute reveals that retirees with substantial savings ($500,000 or more) had spent down a median of only 11.8% of their money 20 years after retirement, demonstrating the extent to which precautionary saving leads to massive underutilization of resources (53). The book presents sobering calculations showing that even middle-class individuals like the hypothetical Elizabeth effectively “worked for free” for years of their lives, earning money they never spent. This reframing transforms what society celebrates as responsible financial behavior into a tragic misallocation of life’s most precious resource: time.
Perkins challenges the retirement planning industry’s focus on asset accumulation rather than optimal resource utilization across one’s lifespan. “We are solving for your total life enjoyment,” he emphasizes, distinguishing this goal from the wealth maximization that drives most financial planning (70). Traditional financial advisors often have misaligned incentives, he says, preferring to manage assets rather than help clients optimize spending for maximum life satisfaction. The economist Franco Modigliani’s Life Cycle Hypothesis receives attention, serving as academic support for the “die with zero” approach, giving theoretical credibility to Perkins’s challenge of conventional financial wisdom. This framework suggests that rational individuals should aim to spend down their assets completely by their expected date of death, an approach at odds with the conservative spending strategies promoted by much of the financial industry.
The financial planning paradigm presented in Die With Zero represents a fundamental challenge to deeply rooted cultural narratives about responsible saving and spending. By reframing wealth as merely a means to experiencing life rather than an end in itself, Perkins offers an alternative framework for evaluating financial decisions.
Becoming Intentional About Time, Money, and Health
In Die With Zero, Perkins presents a profound challenge to conventional financial wisdom by advocating for intentional allocation of three key resources: time, money, and health. Rather than mindlessly accumulating wealth while neglecting experiences, Perkins argues that individuals should make deliberate decisions about these resources based on their changing availability throughout life. The philosophy centers on recognizing that autopilot behaviors—whether excessive saving or unexamined spending—prevent optimal resource allocation and ultimately diminish lifetime fulfillment. Intentional living, he argues, requires acknowledging the diminishing utility of money with age, strategically trading abundant resources for scarce ones, and actively planning financial transfers to maximize their impact.
The declining utility of money with age forms a central pillar of Perkins’s argument for intentionality. As health inevitably deteriorates, the ability to extract enjoyment from money correspondingly diminishes. Perkins illustrates this concept through the example of his grandmother, who couldn’t spend the $10,000 he gave her because her interests and capabilities had narrowed with age. “All she really wanted to buy at that point was a sweater for me,” Perkins notes, highlighting how even substantial sums of money can become less useful as one ages (115). This observation leads to a counterintuitive conclusion: The conventional advice to save aggressively for retirement often results in having the most money precisely when one has the least ability to enjoy it. The failure to recognize this declining utility represents a form of unconscious living that Perkins challenges readers to overcome through more deliberate financial planning that considers not just the quantity of money but the timing of its use.
Intentional resource allocation requires recognizing which resources are abundant versus scarce at different life stages and making strategic exchanges between them. Perkins points out that young people typically have abundant health and time but limited money, while retirees often have money and time but diminished health. Middle-aged individuals, particularly those with families, generally have increasing wealth but face severe time constraints. Perkins asserts that “[t]o get the most positive life experiences at any age, you must balance your life, and this requires you to exchange an abundant resource in order to get more of a scarce one” (120). This principle manifests differently at different life stages—young people might preserve their scarce money but should value their abundant time, while middle-aged individuals with growing wealth should consider using money to buy back time through services like laundry or housecleaning. The travel example Perkins provides further illustrates how health constraints evolve with age: “People under age 60 are most constrained by time and money, whereas people 75 and older are most constrained by health problems” (110). Recognizing these changing constraints allows for more intentional decisions about when to have specific experiences.
Intentionality extends beyond personal resource allocation to the timing of financial transfers to others. Perkins challenges the common practice of waiting until death to transfer wealth to children or charitable causes, arguing that such delays significantly reduce the impact of these transfers. Rather than allowing random timing to determine when recipients receive money, Perkins advocates for deliberately planning transfers to coincide with periods when they can have maximum impact. For charitable giving, he contrasts the approach of Chuck Feeney, who gave away billions during his lifetime, with that of Sylvia Bloom, who accumulated wealth secretly and donated it only after her death. Perkins notes that “the time to start relieving [suffering] is now, not at some distant date in the future,” emphasizing that intentional giving requires consideration not just of amount but of timing (100). Similarly, for transfers to children, he advocates giving money between ages 26 to 35, when they are “old enough to be trusted with money, yet young enough to fully enjoy its benefits” (87). This approach replaces the passive, autopilot approach to wealth transfer with an active, intentional strategy designed to maximize impact.
Becoming intentional about time, money, and health requires abandoning societal scripts and autopilot behaviors in favor of deliberate planning that accounts for individual circumstances and changing resource availability throughout life. This intentional approach ultimately transforms financial planning from a passive accumulation process into an active tool for maximizing life experiences and their lasting impact.
