The calculation was blunt. Continue at the current spending rate, keep the investments performing reasonably, and he’d leave tens of millions of dollars unspent on his deathbed. Those weren’t ten million dollars. They were the experiences — the trips, the gatherings, the adventures, the gifts — that money could have purchased and now never would. The money had outlived its utility. He had optimized for accumulation past the point where accumulation served him.
Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life, published in 2020, is Perkins’s attempt to articulate the philosophy he developed from that calculation. Its central argument is simultaneously obvious and almost universally ignored: the purpose of money is experience, not storage. The goal of financial planning should not be maximum accumulation; it should be maximum life — measured in memorable experiences — with zero dollars remaining at death.
This is a book that will annoy a specific type of reader: the committed wealth accumulator who measures financial success by account balance regardless of whether those balances ever convert into anything meaningful. For everyone else, it raises questions worth sitting with.
Final Word on Die With Zero
Die With Zero is a provocative, occasionally frustrating, and ultimately important book about a topic that almost every financial planning framework ignores: the cost of not spending.
Conventional personal finance books explain how to accumulate. They optimize for the balance sheet without asking whether the balance sheet serves the life. Perkins asks that question directly and insistently. The answer, for the majority of people who have already achieved basic financial security, is often: not as much as expected, and less with each passing year.
The frustrations: Perkins writes from the perspective of someone who had significant wealth to optimize, and some of his prescriptions do not translate cleanly to people who are still building. The die with zero principle is seductive but requires an accurate actuarial estimate of lifespan and health trajectory that most people lack. And some of the case studies feel cherry-picked for maximum rhetorical impact.
The importance: the framework he offers — memory dividends, time bucketing, the three-season model of life — is genuinely useful and almost entirely absent from conventional financial planning. Read it as a counterweight to the accumulation obsession of mainstream personal finance, not as a literal prescription.
The Memory Dividend: Why Experiences Compound
Perkins’s most original concept is the memory dividend — the ongoing psychological return that memorable experiences pay out over the rest of a life.
Spend money on a memorable experience — a trip to a place long wanted, an adventure that pushed real boundaries, a gathering of people you love in a setting that matters — and the experience isn’t just consumed in the moment. It gets carried forward. Recalled, reinterpreted, shared, mined for ongoing psychological value for the rest of a life. The dividend is not the experience itself; it is the residual joy of having had it.
The financial analogy is deliberate. Invest ten thousand dollars today at seven percent annually, and after twenty years there’s nearly forty thousand dollars. Spend ten thousand dollars on a memorable experience at thirty-five, and if the memory dividend is positive — genuine ongoing satisfaction from having had it — the return over the following decades may exceed the financial return on the invested alternative.
The key word is memorable. Not all experiences generate meaningful dividends. The meal nobody can remember, the trip spent too stressed to enjoy, the adventure spent photographing rather than inhabiting — these generate no compound return. The experiences that qualify are those fully inhabited, genuinely stretching, and meaningful to the person having them. This is where Perkins’s framework gets personal: only the individual knows which experiences will pay dividends for them, which requires a level of self-knowledge that many people have deliberately avoided developing.
“Your life is the sum of your experiences. This means that maximizing your life means maximizing your experiences.” — Bill Perkins
Time Bucketing: The Planning Tool That Actually Reflects Reality
Perkins’s most practically useful contribution is the concept of time bucketing — dividing remaining life into intervals and planning the experiences to have in each.
The conventional financial planning horizon is: work until sixty-five, retire, spend gradually until death. This model ignores two important facts. First, the ability to enjoy different types of experiences changes dramatically with age. The forty-year-old can hike the Appalachian Trail; the seventy-year-old probably cannot. The twenty-five-year-old can travel with total spontaneity; the parent of three young children cannot. Second, experiences postponed to retirement may be permanently declined — not because the person will not live to retirement age, but because the version of themselves who wanted that experience will no longer exist.
Time bucketing operationalizes this by asking: what’s worth experiencing in the thirties that would be physically or practically impossible in the fifties? What could happen at sixty that can’t happen now? What must happen before children, after children, before parents decline, after they do? The answers vary enormously by person, but the exercise of asking them reveals the urgency of certain experiences in ways that the conventional deferred-living model obscures.
The practical output of time bucketing is not a rigid schedule but a prioritization framework. Identify the experiences in each time bucket that matter most, and there’s a basis for financial planning decisions that goes beyond save more or invest better. How much is needed to fund the experiences in the next time bucket? What would need to be given up to fund them? Is that trade-off worth it?
The Three Seasons: Young and Healthy, Old and Healthy, Old and Unhealthy
The first phase — young and healthy — is the period when physical capacity is high, obligations are relatively few, and the range of possible experiences is widest. This is the phase when adventure travel, extreme sports, and physically demanding pursuits are available. Most financial planning advice says minimize spending in this phase and accumulate aggressively. Perkins’s counter: the experiences available in this phase are not substitutable. A forty-five-year-old can hike in Patagonia, but has a different version of that experience than a twenty-five-year-old does. The deferral cost is real.
The second phase — old and healthy — typically covers retirement years during which health is still good but the range of possible activities has shifted. Long-haul adventure travel may still be possible; extended backpacking probably is not. The experiences available in this phase — cultural travel, multigenerational gatherings, leisurely exploration — are different from but not worse than earlier ones. This is the phase conventional financial planning optimizes for, often at the expense of the first.
The third phase — old and unhealthy — is characterized by declining physical and cognitive capacity and sharply reduced ability to derive value from most categories of experience. Money in this phase can purchase comfort, care, and security, but it cannot purchase most of what made earlier experiences valuable. The financial implication: accumulating beyond the capital required to fund phases one and two and provide adequate care in phase three is accumulating beyond the utility of money.
This model is not depressing — it is clarifying. It flags when opportunities for specific types of experiences will be highest, which flags when spending on those experiences is most valuable. The failure to make this explicit produces the default of deferral, which produces the deathbed calculation that led Perkins to write the book.
Giving Money: The Case for Early Inheritance
Perkins argues this is the wrong timing on two counts. First, children who receive an inheritance at their parents’ death are typically in their fifties or sixties — financially established, well past the years when a significant capital infusion would have been most useful. The twenty-five-year-old child who receives one hundred thousand dollars while starting a career, starting a family, trying to buy a house, has dramatically higher utility for that money than the fifty-year-old child who receives a million dollars after those challenges have been navigated. The same capital produces more life per dollar when transferred earlier.
Second, the giver is dead when the bequest occurs. No memory dividend gets collected from seeing the capital put to use. The joy of contributing to a grandchild’s college education while alive to see them graduate is simply not available to the person who bequeaths money posthumously. Perkins’s prescription: give early, give while the impact can be observed, give in amounts matched to the recipient’s current capacity to benefit.
The same logic applies to charitable giving. The donor who gives significantly to causes they care about at sixty, while they can witness the impact and engage with the organization, derives more personal value from the giving than the donor who leaves a large bequest in their will. And arguably the recipient organizations are better served by gifts given while the donor can provide guidance and accountability alongside the capital.
The Counterarguments: Where Perkins Is Too Simple
Perkins is honest about the counterarguments, and it is worth engaging with them directly.
The actuarial problem: die with zero requires knowing the time of death with sufficient precision to plan financial depletion accurately. Most people do not know this. The risk of dying at seventy-five having depleted savings versus dying at ninety-five having depleted savings at eighty-two are radically different outcomes. Perkins’s solution — annuities and long-term care insurance — is technically correct but practically complex, and his dismissal of the longevity risk underplays how genuinely terrifying outliving your money is for most people.
The Maslow problem: Perkins’s framework assumes a level of financial security that allows experiential optimization. For people still building that security — still paying down student loans, still building an emergency fund, still working toward basic financial stability — the die with zero framework is premature. The baseline has to be secured before experience allocation can be optimized. Perkins acknowledges this but does not spend enough time on where the threshold is.
The psychological problem: money provides psychological security that is not reducible to its functional utility. The person who knows they have a substantial financial cushion experiences less ambient anxiety than the person who has deployed all their capital into experiences and has a minimal balance sheet. This psychological value of financial reserves is real and legitimate, and Perkins’s model does not account for it adequately.
The legacy problem: Perkins focuses heavily on leaving money to children and causes, but some people’s deepest value comes from building something — a business, an institution, a body of work — that outlasts them. The capital required to fund that kind of legacy-building does not fit cleanly into the die-with-zero model.
What the Research Says
The psychological research on experiential versus material spending consistently supports Perkins’s premise that experiences generate more lasting satisfaction than equivalent purchases of things. Thomas Gilovich and colleagues at Cornell have conducted extensive research showing that experiential purchases — travel, concerts, activities — generate more lasting positive affect than material purchases of equivalent monetary value, partly because experiences are less subject to the hedonic adaptation that quickly makes new possessions feel normal.
The research on deathbed regrets is also consistent with Perkins’s thesis. Bronnie Ware’s work with terminal patients found that financial regrets were essentially absent from the list of common regrets. The dominant regrets were about experiences not had, relationships not prioritized, authentic self-expression not pursued. Nobody wished they had worked more. Nobody wished they had accumulated a larger balance sheet.
The research on retirement spending patterns provides some support for Perkins’s concerns about over-accumulation. Studies of actual retiree spending show that many retirees, particularly those who accumulated aggressively, systematically underspend relative to their capacity during the healthy early retirement years — often because of the same anxiety about running out of money that Perkins identifies as the obstacle. The result is that the wealth accumulated to fund retirement experiences goes undeployed.
Research by James Poterba at MIT has documented that a substantial fraction of retirees die with substantial assets — not because they planned to, but because they could not bring themselves to spend the principal they had spent decades accumulating. The psychological barrier to spending wealth that took a lifetime to build is higher than most retirement planning models account for.
The RW Framework: Applying Die With Zero Without Going Broke
- Do the three-seasons exercise. Write down what’s worth experiencing in each of Perkins’s three phases of life. Be specific. Not travel more but two weeks in Japan and a month in Patagonia before forty. The specificity is what makes the planning real rather than aspirational.
- Identify the current time bucket. What experiences are uniquely available in the current life phase that would not be available — or would be substantially different — in a later one? These have an implicit expiration date that makes them more urgent than the deferred-until-retirement model acknowledges.
- Calculate the enough number. What’s actually needed — not wanted, needed — to fund the experiences in the time buckets and provide adequate security through the final phase? This number is almost certainly lower than the default accumulation target. The gap represents experiences being permanently declined.
- Design early giving. Planning to leave money to children or causes? Identify the point at which that capital would be most useful to them and plan transfers accordingly. The conversation with adult children about financial plans is uncomfortable and worth having.
- Test the relationship with money depletion. If the idea of depleting savings by design generates intense anxiety, that is useful diagnostic information. The anxiety is worth examining before it defaults into permanent accumulation past the point of utility.
Internal Links: Related Reading on This Site
Key Lessons from Die With Zero
- The purpose of money is experience, not storage. The goal of financial planning should be maximum life, not maximum balance sheet.
- Memory dividends compound over time. Experiences that are fully inhabited generate ongoing psychological returns through the memories they produce.
- Time bucketing reveals the urgency of experiences tied to specific life phases. Deferring everything to retirement permanently forgoes experiences that only the current version of a person can have.
- The three-seasons model clarifies when money has highest utility and when accumulation exceeds the utility of money.
- Early giving — to children, to causes — produces more life per dollar than posthumous bequests, both for the giver and the recipient.
- The die-with-zero principle requires actuarial honesty about longevity risk that Perkins underplays. Annuities and long-term care insurance are the appropriate tools for managing this risk.
- The dominant deathbed regrets are experiential, not financial. Nobody wishes they had worked more or accumulated a larger balance sheet.
Reader Questions About Die With Zero
Not quite. Perkins’s actual prescription is to deploy capital into experiences and giving throughout life rather than accumulating indefinitely. He accounts for longevity uncertainty through annuities that guarantee income regardless of lifespan. The zero is conceptual — optimize for life, not for the balance sheet — rather than a precise financial target.
Is this irresponsible for people who do not have significant wealth?
The framework applies differently at different wealth levels. Perkins acknowledges that a financial baseline is needed before optimizing for experiences. The primary audience for the book’s prescriptions is people who have already built financial security and are on track to accumulate well beyond what they will ever spend — the people for whom the cost is not spending more but spending less.
What about the risk of unexpected expenses such as medical or family emergencies?
The answer is insurance — health, long-term care, life — which converts unpredictable catastrophic risks into predictable manageable premiums. Perkins is clear that the uncertainty argument for hoarding cash is best addressed through insurance rather than through excess accumulation. Whether that is practically achievable for everyone is a more complicated question that the book does not fully resolve.
How does Perkins’s advice interact with retirement planning?
He is not arguing against retirement accounts or the mechanics of conventional financial planning. He is arguing that the optimization target should change: instead of maximize accumulation, optimize for fund the experiences in each time bucket adequately. The financial instruments are the same; the goal driving their use is different.
What if there’s genuinely no clarity about what experiences matter?
Perkins’s framework has limited utility for people who have not developed clarity about what they want their life to contain. The time bucketing exercise implicitly requires self-knowledge that many people have systematically avoided developing. The book is most useful for people who have some sense of what matters to them and lack the framework to prioritize it financially.
Is this compatible with FIRE — Financial Independence, Retire Early?
Partially. Perkins agrees with FIRE’s rejection of the default work-until-sixty-five timeline. He disagrees with the extreme frugality some FIRE approaches require, arguing that the experiences sacrificed during the intense accumulation phase have real costs. His framework suggests a FIRE approach that balances accumulation with intentional experience spending along the way.
What is the single most actionable takeaway?
Do the time bucketing exercise. Write down specifically what’s worth experiencing in the next decade that would be meaningfully harder or impossible in the decade after. Then figure out what it would cost and whether it’s being prioritized in the current financial plan. For most people, the answer is: it costs less than expected, and no, it isn’t being prioritized.
How does memory dividend thinking change everyday spending decisions?
The question shifts from can this be afforded to will this generate a memory dividend. That framing directs spending toward fully inhabited experiences and away from consumption that generates no lasting return. It does not require spending more — just spending differently.
What about people who genuinely enjoy accumulation itself?
Perkins acknowledges that some people derive genuine satisfaction from building wealth as an activity, not merely as a means to experience. His framework is less applicable to them. Tracking net worth growth and optimizing portfolio construction as a genuine source of ongoing satisfaction — not just a rationalization? Then accumulation itself is the experience, and the framework shifts accordingly.
What should be read alongside this book?
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel provides the behavioral finance context that Perkins’s book lacks. JL Collins’s Simple Path to Wealth provides the accumulation mechanics. Together the three books cover the full spectrum: how to build wealth efficiently, how to think about it behaviorally, and how to convert it into a life worth living.
Die With Zero will not appeal to everyone. The person whose deepest satisfaction comes from building and accumulating — from seeing the balance sheet grow — will find Perkins’s framework alien and possibly uncomfortable. That is fine. Not every framework applies to every person.
For the person who has been deferring experiences indefinitely while accumulating past any reasonable definition of enough, the book provides something that most financial advice does not: permission to spend, grounded in a framework that explains why the spending is not irresponsible but is, in fact, the entire point.
Money is a tool. The tool has one purpose: to fund a life worth living. Dying with a large balance sheet means the tool served the tool, not the life. Perkins’s contribution is the uncomfortable arithmetic that makes this impossible to ignore.
The experiences available today — the specific version of a person that exists right now, with current health, current relationships, current curiosity and capacity — will not be available to a future version who waited. The window is open. The question Perkins keeps asking, in different forms across every chapter of this book, is whether that window gets walked through, or whether the rest of the reader’s life gets spent managing the account that was supposed to fund the walking.
The Interest Rate on Unlived Experiences
There is a financial concept that Perkins extends beyond money into life: opportunity cost. Keep one hundred thousand dollars in an index fund rather than spending it on a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and the experience isn’t simply deferred. The opportunity cost of that experience gets paid every year it remains unchosen, because the version of the person who could have that experience most fully is aging out of it.
The interest rate on unlived experiences is negative and compounding. The fifty-year-old who could have gone to Antarctica at thirty-five is not worse off by zero — they are worse off by fifteen years of memory dividends never collected, plus the diminishing probability that the experience remains available at all. The opportunity cost of deferral is not the future value of the money. It is the present value of the memories that will never exist.
Perkins calculates this differently for different types of experiences. Low-urgency experiences — those equally available at forty-five as at thirty-five — have low deferral costs. High-urgency experiences — those tied to specific physical capacities, specific relationship configurations, specific windows of time — have enormous deferral costs that conventional financial planning never charges for but that get paid in full nonetheless.
The practical implication: when evaluating a significant experience expenditure, ask not just what it costs now but what the opportunity cost of not doing it is. The cost of not going to an aging parent’s birthplace with them while they can still travel is not zero. The cost of not taking the trip with young children while they still want to travel along is not zero. These costs are real, they are paid in currency that cannot be refunded, and they should factor into the decision as prominently as the financial cost of going.
The Conversation Nobody Has: Talking to Your Family About Money and Time
One of the most practically valuable but least developed sections of the book concerns family financial conversations — specifically, the conversations that most families never have and then desperately wish they had.
The conversation about inheritance timing: most parents with significant assets have never explicitly discussed with their adult children when those assets will be transferred or in what form. The result is that children plan their own finances without knowing whether to factor in a future inheritance, while parents hold capital that could be transformatively useful now, waiting to transfer it under conditions (their own death) where the conversation can never happen.
Perkins’s prescription: have the conversation explicitly. Tell the children roughly what to expect and when. Planning to give early? Say so. Planning to leave significant assets to charity? Say so. The conversation is uncomfortable because it involves discussing mortality and money simultaneously, but the discomfort is a one-time cost, and the alternative — planning in mutual ignorance — has ongoing costs that compound.
The conversation about experiences while they can still be had: parents who want to travel with their adult children wait until those children have young kids of their own, then wonder why coordination is impossible. Grandparents who want to take grandchildren on meaningful trips wait until the grandchildren are teenagers who would rather be anywhere else. The window for multigenerational experiences is real and time-bounded, and the families who use it are the ones who planned to use it rather than defaulting to someday.
This section of the book is less about personal finance than about legacy — the experiences created with people who are loved while the opportunity exists. No financial instrument can replicate the memory dividend of a well-timed, fully inhabited family experience. And no amount of posthumous wealth transfer can compensate for the experiences that were available and declined.
The Net Worth Number That Actually Matters
Perkins proposes a concept he calls the personal enough number — the amount of capital required to fund all the experiences in the remaining time buckets plus adequate care in the final phase. This is different from the conventional retirement number, which is typically calculated as a multiple of annual expenses rather than as the cost of a specifically designed life.
The difference is significant. The conventional retirement number is conservative by design — it provides for an indefinite future at the current spending rate. The enough number is purpose-built — it funds specific experiences rather than an indefinite standard of living. For many people, the enough number is substantially lower than the retirement number, because the experiences actually wanted in each time bucket cost less than the implicit spending being saved to maintain indefinitely.
The exercise of calculating the enough number is revelatory for most people who attempt it seriously. It converts the abstract goal of more into a specific target with a finite value, which transforms the relationship to accumulation. Instead of save as much as possible for as long as possible, the goal becomes achieve the enough number and then begin deploying capital into the time-bucketed experiences that justified the saving in the first place.
This is not permission to stop planning or to spend recklessly. It is permission to understand what the saving was actually for — to convert the abstract security motive into a concrete life design — and to stop accumulating past the point where accumulation serves the design.
The people who have done this calculation and arrived at their enough number almost universally report that the process changed their relationship with both money and time. Not because they spend more or work less, necessarily, but because they understand why they are doing both — which turns a reflexive behavior into an intentional one.
Perkins did not write a perfect book. He wrote an important one. The distinction matters because the imperfect parts — the actuarial handwaving, the insufficient attention to people who are still building rather than optimizing, the occasional self-congratulatory case study — can obscure the important parts to a reader who isn’t reading generously.
The important parts are these: most people who have achieved financial security are accumulating past the point where accumulation serves them. The experiences they are saving to eventually have are aging out of availability. The people they most want to share those experiences with are aging alongside them. The conversation about this — about what money is actually for, about what enough actually means, about when the tool should begin serving the life rather than consuming it — is one that almost no financial planning framework prompts and that Perkins, imperfectly but usefully, insists on having.
The window is open. The question is whether the rest of a life gets spent managing the account that was supposed to fund the living, or whether the life the account was supposed to fund actually gets lived.
That is the question Die With Zero keeps asking. Worth asking back.
One more thing. Perkins’s framework works best when applied not to hypothetical future decisions but to concrete immediate ones. Not at retirement. Not when the kids are grown. Not when the mortgage is paid off. Now. What’s the one experience in the current time bucket that’s been deferred, that has an implicit expiration date, and that there’s financial capacity to have right now if it were prioritized?
That question is the book in one sentence. Everything else is Perkins making the case for why it should be taken seriously — with enough force, and enough uncomfortable math, that most readers find it genuinely difficult to dismiss.
Worth saying again. Perkins’s framework works best when applied not to hypothetical future decisions but to concrete immediate ones. Not at retirement. Not when the kids are grown. Not when the mortgage is paid off. Now. What’s the one experience in the current time bucket that’s been deferred, that has an implicit expiration date, and that there’s financial capacity to have right now if it were prioritized?
That question is the book in one sentence. Everything else is Perkins making the case for why it should be taken seriously — with enough force, and enough uncomfortable math, that most readers find it genuinely difficult to dismiss.
Related: Deep Survival Summary
The Practical Framework: Applying Die With Zero Summary In Real Life
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