Here are my personal notes on Bill Perkins’s book Die With Zero.

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  • Thriving, not surviving.
  • Your life is the sum of your experiences.
  • Life is the business of acquiring experiences.
    • Generate more or better experiences.
    • Time as life energy. Salary as trading life energy for the promise of future experiences.
    • Experiences don’t have to cost a lot of money. Free pleasures. Streets. Daily comforts and abilities (taken for granted). Hanging out with friends — building friendship.
  • Invest in experiences.
    • Invest early to benefit longer. Figure out your shit.
      • “When you face a large rectangular panel with a protruding round knob, you don’t ask yourself, What is this thing? No, you know it’s a door. And you know how to open that door. So there’s a huge dividend from having once learned what a door is — think of all the doors you can open!”
      • Relational history: knowing you love that person, all the history, conversations, shared experiences that went into the relationship.
  • Experiences compound over time. Experiences are an investment. You live the experience, and then re-live it many times over in your head across the years (memory dividend). Experiential richness — your inner filmography; making your own entertainment (=fun).
    • “Every time you remember the original experience, you get an additional experience from mentally and emotionally reliving the original experience.” Return-on-experience.
      • Communal recall is a communal experience. “Whenever you interact with someone, sharing an experience you’ve had, that is an experience in itself. You’re communicating, laughing, bonding, giving advice, helping them, being vulnerable — you’re doing the stuff of everyday life.”
    • You retire on your memories. “When you’re too frail to do anything, you can still look back on the life you’ve lived and experience pride, joy, nostalgia.” (End scene.)
  • “When something feels abundant and endless, we don’t value it.”
  • Personal interest rate — how much does one need to pay you to postpone a positive experience (e.g. a vacation by a year)? (e.g. new year’s freelancer fee premium). The money needs to let you enjoy a better experience in the near future. The older you get the more life interest you charge, until it’s infinite interest — it doesn’t make sense to postpone the experience anymore.
  • We are irrational about death — we pretend it doesn’t exist and don’t plan for it. We live as if we’ll live on forever.
  • Know when you will die, so you can retroplan your experiences, and the spending of your money.
    • If you don’t know when you will die, you cannot plan to die with zero — you will be afraid to run out of money too soon.
  • Imagine only having 30 days left before moving far away — what would you do? Seeing friends again, enjoying the cafés. (Akin to vacation scenario — just one week and have to make the most of it.) Regularly moving places to precipitate. At events: “I will never meet this person ever again if I don’t …”
  • The closer you are to the end, the less you should provision. Living as if today was your last day — as if you have one week to live — one month — one year — three years — dictate differently how you would spend your day (and rightfully so). Living today as if it were your last day is not viable.
    • You can always make more money later, but you can never get back youthful and healthy time that has passed.
    • Focus on not squandering your life, rather than not squandering your money.
  • Time buckets: bucket list per period of your life, based on physical ability (health) & wealth. Postpone expensive hobbies that don’t require great health to later stages of your life.
    • What are the goals of your current bucket?
    • Experiences all have their limited window of opportunity.
    • Regrets don’t just happen at the end of your life; they happen at the end of each time bucket, when the window of opportunity closes — when you missed out on having experiences while you still could.
    • “The saddest is when the realization doesn’t hit until you’re facing your own mortality, when it really is too late to change anything and all you can do is make peace with your past.”
    • “If you wait five years to stop saving, your overall health declines by five years, closing the window on certain experiences altogether.”
  • “Many people at midlife have forgotten what used to bring them fulfillment and have been too busy taking care of careers to explore new interests, either.”
  • Many small deaths. Each last time you can do something (and enjoy it) is a death. There will be a last time you can do your favourite hobby, walk… The list of activities you can do diminishes as you age. Spend aggressively on experiences you enjoy — while you can.
    • “The teenager in you dies, the college student in you dies, the single unattached you dies…”
    • Seize risks with little downside and great upside. The risk of not taking opportunities. What big invites are you scared of, are postponing or declining? “When the downside is very low and the upside is really high, it’s actually riskier not to make the bold move.”
    • Take more risks when young — you have more time to recover. Take risks while you are free, without love or family ties.
    • “Autopilot” — Liberators International, the opposite of autopilot.
  • One-off opportunities. Infinite downside to passing on them. Splurging on birthday parties, inviting all of your friends while they’re all still there — The Power of Moments.
  • Travel while you have the health to do so.
  • “When time and money are no longer a problem, health is.”
    • Health-Money-Time triangle. Trading one for the other. Time for health (workout), time for money (work), health for money (work), etc.
    • Health is the most valuable there is. “No amount of money can ever make up for very poor health — whereas people in good health but with little money can still have many wonderful experiences.”
      • Poor health lets you enjoy experiences less. Getting tired quickly, etc.
      • “Investing in your health is investing in every single subsequent experience.”
    • “But afterwards he was in a lot of pain and realized that skiing seven days straight is too much for him now.” Dance and enjoy the body in all its forms while you can. “Think about your current physical health: What experiences can you have now that you might not be able to have later?”
    • “And it occurred to me that everybody becomes like that eventually. As you get older, your health declines and your interests gradually narrow, just as your sex drive diminishes.”
      • “And when you’re extremely old and frail, no matter what your level of interest is, just about all you can do is sit and eat tapioca pudding. At that point, money is useless to you, because all you need or want is to lie in bed and watch Jeopardy. The utility, or usefulness, of money declines with age.”
  • Invest early on in your health — allows you to enjoy experiences for longer, delays death, makes you (biologically) younger.
    • People of all ages should be spending more time and money on their health.
  • People benefit more from money when they’re young. People can make less and less use of their money as they grow older due to deteriorating health.
  • Don’t save during your first jobs — you will make more money later. “Taking money from your starving younger self to give to your future wealthier self.”
    • Borrow, don’t save on your first jobs. “You should be living today in much the way that you’ll be living in 10 or 15 years, and it’s crazy to actually be scrimping and saving.”
  • Spend more at your peak age, less and less as you grow older.
  • “Go-go, slow-go, no-go years”: different phases of retirement where you progressively spend less and less.
  • Money is experiences not had. If you die with $1 million left, that’s $1 million of experiences you didn’t have.
  • Leftover money (at your death) is time spent working you didn’t have to. Hours spent at your office job you didn’t need to spend. "Two and a half years of working for free."
  • Retire earlier or spend more money throughout your life.
  • Net worth keeps growing as people age — “what are they waiting for?”
    • Start using your savings at some point after having saved enough for old age.
  • Use money to enjoy more of your peak years rather than saving for some extra days in palliative care. Not all time is equal. While the consciousness is still bright… “Giving up years of their life while healthy and vibrant to buy a few extra weeks of life when sick and immobile.”
  • Some experiences benefit from spending more money on. Las Vegas at 40 vs Las Vegas at 20: Las Vegas with money is much better than Las Vegas with little money.
  • A higher salary is not automatically a higher wage. You might get paid more but for a ton more work. How much you work, how much money you get per hour of work. Somebody making $70k a year might make less per hour than somebody making $40k a year (and the latter has so much more free time).
  • Outsource chores. Outsource cleaning. Things you could do and enjoy instead — replaces a negative life experience with a positive one.
  • If you love your job, spend more on work, to have more pleasure at work. (Professional development.)
  • Donate to heirs when they can most benefit from it, not when you’re dead (or they are) — i.e. in their 20s-30s, when they are low on money. Or set up a trust if they’re too young to be responsible with money. Money buys experiences.
  • Donate to charity now, not when you’re dead — charities benefit from having the money now.
    • Charities hoarding: “taking $90 billion but distributing $25 billion” — “donors should ask not just how, but how soon, their gifts will be used.”
  • Many wrong ways, one right way. There are many ways to be suboptimal and only one way to be perfectly optimal. (Or: many right ways — universalist churches, human Good — many ways to the truth).
  • Don’t wait. Do the bold thing now.