Die with Zero

When you think about your life, do you measure success by how much you’ve saved—or by how much you’ve experienced? In Die with Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life, entrepreneur and energy trader Bill Perkins challenges everything society teaches about money, retirement, and fulfillment. He argues that life’s goal isn’t to maximize wealth but to maximize meaningful experiences. Money is only valuable if it’s used—to create memories, relationships, and moments that give life depth, not just financial security.

Perkins contends that we waste countless hours chasing financial growth, all while neglecting what really provides joy and meaning. “You retire on your memories,” he says. At the end of your life, you won’t wish you’d worked harder—you’ll wish you’d lived better. The book’s central message is simple yet radical: plan and spend deliberately so you end up with zero money left at death, but infinite fulfillment from the experiences you’ve accumulated. Dying with zero isn’t about recklessness—it’s about intention.

Breaking the Myth of Endless Saving

Perkins begins with a story about his boss on Wall Street scolding him for saving too much while earning little. That moment cracked open his thinking: saving money for a future self who would be older and richer made little sense. Across the book, he dismantles what he calls the myth of the “ant”—the ever-saving worker who hoards for retirement, forgetting to actually live along the way. In opposition, he honors the “grasshopper,” who plays when the sun shines, though he emphasizes balance: “The ant would live better if he learned to play a little.”

Perkins brings together economic ideas such as the Life-Cycle Hypothesis (from Franco Modigliani) and behavioral insights about consumption smoothing, showing how money should flow through the phases of life to maximize enjoyment. Saving indefinitely, he argues, is irrational when health and ability to enjoy that money naturally decline.

Experiences as Investments

Perkins reframes experiences as investments that yield lifelong “memory dividends.” Like stocks, experiences pay returns over time—not in cash, but in fulfillment and emotional richness. Each time you recall a trip, a friendship, or a milestone, you “cash in” on the mental and emotional dividends of that experience. The more experiences you create early, the more dividends you’ll receive over decades. He urges starting early, especially when young, healthy, and unburdened by responsibilities, because those experiences compound through memory and sharing.

He even quantifies experiences in “experience points,” turning fulfillment into a measurable curve. The height of your curve corresponds to the sum of the positive experiences you’ve lived—its area representing your lifetime fulfillment. Maximizing this curve means deliberately shaping when and how you spend time and money, not leaving your life to autopilot.

Timing Your Life’s “Mini Deaths”

Perkins emphasizes that life happens in seasons—each age brings unique experiences that disappear forever. His “time buckets” approach encourages mapping out your life in five- or ten-year intervals, filling each with experiences suited to that stage. Waiting too long for certain experiences can mean missing them entirely: you can’t backpack through Europe or play sports with your children once your health or their youth has faded. Regret is the ultimate cost of delay.

By illustrating these “mini deaths”—like when your children outgrow watching their favorite movie with you—Perkins drives home the urgency of intentional living. Awareness that time is limited makes every moment worth more. He cites research (also echoed in Bronnie Ware’s The Top Five Regrets of the Dying) showing that people’s greatest end-of-life regrets are failing to live authentically and working too hard. His conclusion: treat time as a finite resource before it’s gone.

Money, Meaning, and Mortality

The idea of dying with zero extends beyond personal spending. Perkins explores how to give to children and charities while alive so your money achieves maximum impact. Late inheritances help least, since older recipients derive less joy or utility from them. Instead, give when gifts enhance lives, not just bank accounts. The same applies to philanthropy: donations do more good now than after death. He cites examples from Sylvia Bloom’s delayed giving and Chuck Feeney’s “giving while living” to show how timing transforms generosity into real impact.

In the end, Die with Zero is not a financial manual but a philosophical statement disguised as one. It merges behavioral economics, personal finance, and existential reflection into one bold idea: optimize your life for happiness, not for money. Perkins’s call to action isn’t just to spend smart—it’s to live deliberately, measure experiences, and plan for the fullness of each stage of life. Because when the curtain falls, the only wealth left that matters is the sum of memories you’ve invested in along the way.

Bill Perkins opens his argument by treating life as an optimization challenge—something engineers will appreciate. Every action trades time, money, and energy for possible fulfillment. To maximize that fulfillment, you must allocate these resources intelligently before death. This mindset turns life planning into a version of mathematical efficiency: how to convert finite life energy into the richest possible set of experiences.

Energy, Money, and Experiences

Humans, Perkins writes, are energy-processing units. We consume food and use energy not just to survive but to produce experiences—the true currency of life’s value. Work transforms life energy into money; money, in turn, buys experiences. But most people stop at the first step—working endlessly—without completing the cycle back to joy. The real goal is converting life energy into vivid memories before you run out of both time and vitality.

Why Infinite Saving Fails

Perkins explains, through stories like Erin and John’s battle with terminal illness, that life’s finitude changes everything. Delaying gratification can easily go too far—saving until ‘later’ risks arriving at a point when health is gone. He calls this the tragedy of living as though life were infinite. People often optimize for wealth, believing it ensures future happiness, but the variable they can’t recycle is time. “Squandering your life should be a bigger worry than squandering money,” he insists.

Optimization means balancing time, money, and health across the arc of life. Waiting for a mythical ‘perfect moment’ to spend assumes that life’s curve is static—but it isn’t. Health declines, opportunity windows close, and obligations expand. Maximizing fulfillment requires acting while the curve of ability and desire intersect.

Deliberate Versus Autopilot Living

Most people live on autopilot, Perkins warns. They follow socially accepted financial patterns—work, save, retire—without questioning whether that path actually maximizes life enjoyment. He compares this inertia to driving on cruise control: it keeps you moving but ignores direction. Optimization demands deliberate steering—choosing not just how to earn but how to spend time and energy to yield the greatest returns in significance and joy.

By reframing your life as an optimization experiment, Perkins puts mathematics in the service of meaning. Each decision shifts the shape of your fulfillment curve, changing the “area under the curve”—the total lived joy. You won’t hit perfection, but you’ll live much closer to it than if you never tried.

One of Perkins’s most vivid lessons comes from his friend Jason Ruffo, who borrowed from a loan shark in his twenties to backpack through Europe. That risky choice paid unimaginable dividends—not in money, but in memories. While Perkins stayed home working, Jason came back infinitely richer in stories and perspective. Decades later, Perkins realized that timing, not money, was the critical variable. Jason’s early experiences couldn’t be replicated later, and their emotional return lasted a lifetime.

Life as the Sum of Experiences

Perkins insists your life is the sum total of your experiences—the essence of who you are. Yet most people let culture decide their path, following financial conventions rather than designing memorable journeys. Without deliberate investing—in trips, creative pursuits, relationships, and adventures—life drifts into monotonous routines. He warns that “autopilot living” makes you arrive at death feeling thirsty despite having pumped enough ‘water’ (money) to overflow your cup.

The Memory Dividend

Experiences, Perkins explains, pay ongoing “memory dividends.” Just as stocks yield interest, memories pay emotional returns whenever they’re recalled, shared, or relived. The earlier you invest, the longer and richer your dividends become. He illustrates this with his father, for whom an iPad filled with college football highlights became a source of immense joy late in life. Even when physical activity waned, memories sustained fulfillment—a clear sign that we retire not on money but on memories.

Start Early, Start Cheap

The compounding of memory dividends mirrors Warren Buffett’s principle of early investing. Younger experiences yield longer returns, and youth multiplies enjoyment even with minimal funds. Perkins advises starting now, even if broke—because many of life’s richest experiences cost little. Picnics, festivals, friendships, and exploration are low-cost but high-return if engaged fully and early.

Key takeaway

Waiting for wealth is a false economy. Experiences appreciate through time; possessions depreciate. Start investing in the memories you’ll want to re-live.

The book’s titular concept—dying with zero—demands reprogramming your financial instincts. Perkins contrasts traditional saving with what he calls fulfillment optimization. He uses examples like billionaire John Arnold, who amassed billions but missed the prime years to enjoy them, and ‘Elizabeth,’ a fictional worker whose obsessive saving led to thousands of hours of unpaid labor. Both illustrate the same waste: earning money that never converts into experienced life.

The Waste of Unspent Life Energy

Money represents life energy—each dollar earned equates to time spent alive. Working for money you’ll never use means spending years in exchange for nothing. Perkins’s calculations show that many retirees die leaving large savings untouched, effectively donating years of labor to the void. “It’s hard to teach an old household new rules,” he notes, invoking behavioral economists Hersh Shefrin and Richard Thaler, describing people’s reluctance to decumulate wealth even when rational.

From Fear to Freedom

Two psychological forces prevent dying with zero: habit and fear. Habit keeps you working; fear keeps you hoarding. The cultural mantra of saving for retirement feeds both. Perkins dismantles this fear logically: most people save far more than they’ll spend, their net worth peaking in their seventies as expenses and health decline. Hoarding wealth for medical crises or “precautionary saving,” he argues, rarely pays off—insurance exists for precisely that.

Maximizing Memory Over Money

To die with zero, you redistribute resources toward experiences while alive. Perkins likens this to Modigliani’s Life-Cycle Hypothesis and proposes an emotionally rational form of financial planning: instead of maximizing interest, maximize fulfillment. The result isn’t poverty—it’s efficiency. Every dollar should either sustain survival or create joy. Hoarding beyond your survival threshold equals working for free.

His metaphor of Mario’s “extra life” nails the concept: accumulating wealth you never spend is like earning extra lives in a game and throwing them away unused. In Perkins’s world, your scoreboard isn’t money—it’s memories.

Perkins identifies three currencies of fulfillment: health, money, and free time. The problem is that they rarely coexist. Young people have health and time but little money; older people have wealth and time but poor health. Middle-aged workers are healthiest but time-poor. Balancing these forces defines how much life you can truly enjoy.

The Triangular Trade of Life

Imagine these three currencies—health, money, time—as corners of a triangle. At different ages, one corner dominates. True optimization means trading what’s abundant for what’s scarce: buying time in midlife by outsourcing chores, maintaining health to extend youthful vitality, and using money to create free time for experiences. Perkins encourages spending now to free future hours, even if it means forgoing incremental savings.

Health as the Greatest Multiplier

Nothing amplifies experiences like health. Perkins brings in stories of his chiropractor friend Stephen Stern, who reversed decades of physical neglect and rediscovered joy by restoring fitness. Small health improvements compound like interest, boosting lifetime experience points exponentially. Movement is life; decline steals fulfillment faster than financial loss ever could.

Buying Time — Smart Spending

For those overwhelmed in midlife, spending on time-saving services becomes a moral imperative. Using examples like outsourcing laundry, Perkins shows how purchasing free time increases happiness more than material items—supported by research (Ashley Whillans et al., 2017). Every dollar spent freeing time converts into additional positive experiences, the true wealth multiplier.

Practical insight

When health declines, money can’t buy vitality. So spend on health and time first—they are the foundations that give money its value.

Perkins tackles the moral question haunting his thesis: “What about the kids?” His answer turns cultural inheritance norms upside down—don’t wait until death. Most inheritances arrive when recipients are around sixty, long past their prime years for enjoyment or impact. Giving earlier multiplies utility for both giver and receiver.

Timing the Gift

Children between 26 and 35 derive the maximum benefit from financial gifts. They’re mature enough to manage money and young enough to transform it into experiences—homes, education, adventures. Delaying transfers until your death wastes potential happiness. Perkins recounts the story of Virginia Colin, who inherited money at 49 after decades living near poverty; her father’s fear of scarcity turned generosity into missed opportunity. Earlier support could have enriched both their lives.

Love as Legacy

Beyond money, Perkins reframes legacy as shared experiences and affection. Studies confirm (William Chopik, 2019) that warm parental memories predict better health and lower depression decades later. Every hour spent with children compounds emotional dividends far beyond financial gains. “We retire on memories,” Perkins reminds us—and so do our kids.

Giving to Charity: The Inefficiency of Waiting

Charitable giving follows the same logic. Perkins critiques cases like Sylvia Bloom, who donated millions posthumously but deprived the world of decades of impact. He applauds philanthropists like Chuck Feeney and Robert F. Smith, who gave while living, demonstrating how immediate generosity compounds social return. “You can’t be generous when you’re dead,” he writes bluntly—true generosity requires intention and timing.

Giving early, whether to family or causes, honors the same principle as investing in experiences: timing turns money into meaning.

Risk, according to Perkins, should be age-adjusted. Through stories of Mark Cuban’s scrappy rise, he shows that the best time to take bold leaps is when you’re young and stakes are low. Cuban’s mantra—“I had nothing, so I had nothing to lose”—captures what Perkins calls asymmetric risk: when the upside of success dwarfs the downside of failure.

Asymmetric Decisions

Boldness pays off when potential gains outweigh losses. Failing early merely costs time; succeeding yields lifelong dividends in confidence and experience. He contrasts Cuban’s hustling youth with his own cautious twenties—showing that the cost of inaction is often regret, a burden heavier than failure. Even negative experiences yield “positive memory dividends” through pride and growth.

Quantify Your Fear

Fear inflates risk, Perkins explains. He advises “quantifying your fear”—measuring actual downsides compared to imagined ones. He recounts convincing a young woman named Christine to quit her joyless job, demonstrating through rational math how minimal the real danger was. Evaluating worst-case scenarios reveals that most perceived catastrophes are illusions. Often, what we mistake for caution is comfort masquerading as fear.

Be Bold as You Age—Differently

Boldness in youth means exploring, moving cities, changing careers. Boldness in later life means spending courageously—retiring earlier, living larger, letting go of the hoarded security blanket of savings. In both cases, inaction carries the greatest risk: wasted life energy. Perkins’s message mirrors stoic philosophy (Seneca’s dictum that “we suffer more in imagination than reality”)—fear, not failure, is the true threat to fulfillment.

Essential principle

When you have little to lose, risk is the path to growth. When you have more to lose, courage becomes spending wisely on the life you’ve earned.