How to Die With Zero | Bill Perkins

0:00I'm not an anti-delayed gratification person. I'm a think about the context of your situation and what experiences do you want when. Life is now. Life is urgent. Would you rather have one ski trip in your 30s or let's say two and a half ski trips in your 50s? What is the money for? Hello, friends. This is Tyler Gardner welcoming you to another episode of Your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing. So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be.

0:44Today's guest is someone whose work hit me harder than I expected. Bill Perkins is the author of Die With Zero, a book that came recommended to me by so many people I trust that I finally had to pick it up. And not only did I pick it up, but to be honest, at this point, I think I've read it five times. Because throughout my life, I've been a great saver and investor. I followed all the rules. Save early, save often, invest in low-cost index funds, you know the deal. But what I hadn't realized until reading Bill's book was that the years were indeed starting to pass. And I'm still not quite finding how to balance my investing with my healthy spending on everyday experience.

1:27Bill Perkins doesn't just question the wisdom of saving for some day. He challenges it head on. Die with zero is about optimizing your life while you can, turning money into meaningful experiences, and measuring wealth in time well spent, not just dollars saved. And Bill brings more than theories to the table. He's been a hedge fund manager, a high-stakes poker player, an entrepreneur, and a world traveler to say the least. Someone who knows what it means to manage risk and reward in the real world, not just on spreadsheets. In this conversation, we explore why saving too much can be one of the biggest mistakes you ever make, how to reframe money through the lens of time and meaning, what traditional financial advisors, and many of us, get wrong about retirement and estate planning, and how you can start designing a deliberate and action-oriented life that you actually get to live before it's too late.

2:31So without further ado, a conversation I have been waiting so long to have with Bill Perkins. It's funny. You're one of the only books that has been recommended to me consistently over the last three years by every demographic to which I connect. Like, it's pretty awesome, man. Like 70-year-olds, like, have you read Perkins? And then my 20-year-old connection's like, dude, you got to read Bill Perkins. Like, this is awesome. Like, you hit on something pretty deep, which I'm sure you know by now. But one of the things that obviously drew me to Die With Zero is there's an incredibly cool core of contrarian thinking to a lot of the nonsense we hear throughout life about deferring joy and just kind of letting all the money sit, you know, and letting our lives and bodies kind of break down along the way.

3:18You made a comment early in Die with Zero that you kind of understood this, and I'll even say kind of like this wisdom, when you were at the University of Iowa, and you were majoring in engineering, and you realized early that you didn't necessarily want to go the traditional route of working for a company like IBM. Sam, could you just share a little bit about how you came to that realization so early, whereas it takes so many people decades, if not their entire lives, to figure out they want to try to kind of break the traditional money script or job script? Yeah, I think there was a couple of things that happened.

3:56I think I was leaning towards that or it was in me. And I was going to engineering because it was like, you need to find something to do. And I was interested in engineering, but I wasn't interested in engineering enough to study real hard and get good grades, right? Like I was interested enough to like go and learn. This is interesting. Maybe show up for the test. Maybe not, you know, play football, chase girls, that type of thing. And it just seems so like death to me, but something that needed to be done. Like you need to get a job. And, and I was having a discussion. I don't even know what the discussion was about with this other football player named Dwight Sistrunk.

4:31He came back at me. He was like, listen, Perkins, I'm not like you. I don't want a white picket fence in the house and then a job and two car garage whatever i like i want a different life i just thought it was odd at the time i was like who doesn't want that like that's kind of like every chevy chase movie i've seen you know what i mean with the you know steve martin they got the nice house how do i get a house like that it's the perfect image it's what we all want right right you know the fact that he just boldly stated that gave me a little bit of courage or fired off the neurons in my brain to think about like, what do I really want?

5:04Like if I could snap my fingers. And I didn't think this through completely at the time, but I knew it wasn't that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, and one of the things that kind of sprang from that type of thinking is you also reflect on this anecdote where early in your professional career, you had started to chase the idea that all of us are chasing in some ways in our twenties of like, I got to be thrifty. I've got to save some money. I've got to invest while I can. And you had a fortunate run-in with your boss at the time, Joe Farrell. Yeah. And Joe, can you tell me a little bit about what that run-in entailed and what it taught you about money and how it shaped your thinking going forward?

5:45So the context is, is like, I read a book called Your Money or Your Life at this time. It completely changes your view about what money is. It's like money represents what you exchange hours of your life for. And so one of the results of reading this book is you become really in touch with your values and you tend to become very frugal. And I was extremely frugal at that time. I was looking up all the programs to get like the, buy the bus ticket in advance to get the, you know, and then wait a minute, if you get your boss to get into this government program, they can co-pay and just scrimping and saving.

6:17And I went working at night, driving a limo. I wanted to save, I think about a thousand dollars. And I was sitting there talking to another clerk at the time about how, you know, I'd saved a thousand dollars. I'm proud of him. Joe Farrell over here as a conversation is like, what are you a fucking idiot? And I was like, wait, what? Wait, what? You know, I just got to look and I was like, there's my boss calling me a fucking idiot. And I'm just listening. He goes like, you came here to make millions. Like, what are you doing saving a thousand dollars? Like, go out and spend that money, like enjoy your life.

6:47And so it hit me and I thought about it. I was like, you know, he's kind of right. Like I could easily have quit my screen clerk job to go be a waiter or maybe even work at McDonald's and make more money. right? I didn't come there for that. I came for the future earnings growth and in itself, that was a form of delayed gratification. And it's like, why was I borrowing from my poor self to give to my future richer self? It just didn't make any sense, right? Like what is 86 year old me going to do with an extra thousand dollars, right? Like, or a six year old me. And so I have this problem of being just like a zero or a hundred type of guy.

7:25So I went like a hundred spend the other way, right? Like I didn't find balance, but that, that conversation was pivotal and just me thinking about like, what is it all about? And when should I spend my money and that type of thing? Yeah. But I mean, but it's obviously it's not to blame because like, that's what we're all told. And I'll be the first person to admit that like 90 % of my online content, I'm highly guilty of convincing the next generation to put it in an index fund and save it. And they're like, dude, we're living on$40 ,000 a year in Manhattan. We can't do this. So it seems like kind of a target audience for some of your thinking here is people in their 20s and 30s is just starting to come up with what their relationship with money will be.

8:07So how do you address that particular audience at this time, who on one hand says, Bill, I got it. I'd love to go out and spend and enjoy my 20s while I'm physically and mentally fit. And at the same time, every single money pressure is telling us like, got to get that 401k match, got to get that Roth IRA. Like, how do we balance that for those listeners? I think for each individual, there's going to be a different set of financial circumstances. You know, I'm not an anti-delayed gratification person. I'm a think about the context of your situation and what experiences do you want when, right?

8:44And so some of us are still saving for our survival number later, and that's fine. But realize that, you know, if you're in your 20s, you got a long, long time, right? And you can recover and things can go well and then it can go wrong. We definitely are focusing on the money, but what we're really trying to focus on is what is the fulfilling life for you and what experiences belong when. So that doesn't mean you have to go into a club and pop bottles. It just means that, hey, perhaps I'm going to buy a board game, spring for some pizza and have a fun activity day for all my friends so that can have a fulfilling life.

9:20Sometimes it means that, yeah, instead of putting into the 401k, I'm going to get on a plane and visit relatives in Italy and stay with them and couch surf and have that type of life. And so it's really about not just auto saving just to be saving and auto spending to be auto spending. It's about what activities belong in this time bucket of your life and how do I achieve them? And within that, there's a sub optimization. It's like, well, I really want to go see my friend in Florida. Okay. Bill Perkins might just go buy a first class ticket. You might buy a super saver ticket. You might buy with coupon and points and follow the points guy, right?

10:00And get it cheaper. Or this guy might take the bus. Another guy might hitchhike, right? But we all get that fulfilling experience of seeing our friend, right? So there's sub optimizations and sub optimizations, sub optimization. But what the top layer should be is the most fulfilling life in each period of your life. And money is one of those variables. And so, you know, what I tell people is, is like, I would sit down with your financial planner and I would go through this. If we were just sitting down, we'd hack it out. Right. Yeah. But one of the problems that I hear from people, not just in their twenties or thirties, but in every era of their lives is that we are either surprisingly or not surprisingly terrible at figuring out what actually fulfills us.

10:40And like, what, like, so do you have any tricks? And I'll admit now, like, I'll get to this later. I'm very bad at figuring out like, what is it that money can buy that actually at the end of the day is going to leave me being like, that was awesome. So do you have any techniques you've used throughout your life to kind of figure out this quantitative approach to like, okay, wakeboarding in Texas, 25 points, visiting grandma in California, not 25 points. Notice that I left that part out of the book. That's like the hard part, knowing what you want, right? But I think, you know, I talk about time bucketing, about breaking your life up into periods.

11:19And then within those periods, thinking about what type of experiences you want to have, just by breaking that out and thinking about it, when you list those experiences you want to have, you're listing experiences that intuitively will be fulfilling for you. So if it's like, have a kid, go on a trip, go skiing with my friends, celebrate X, Y, and Z. And as you sit and stare at that blank piece of paper, and trust me, it's tough. Like I thought of this and it's a lot harder than it sounds, right? It's like, oh yeah, just put it down. And then you're standing blank piece of paper in the five years.

11:48You're like, I don't know what I really want to happen these five years. Right. If you write down this time period, let's say you're 25 to 30. You're like, okay, the next five years, what do you get to do? Let's wave a magic wand. What are the experiences you want to have? Right. Is there a trip that you want to have people you want to visit? Also realize that even in a short time period, life is discovery. You don't really necessarily know everything that you want. You discover what you want. A world in which you know, everything is a very sad world. even about yourself. And so like, you need to come back to that piece of paper multiple times.

12:21What are some of the things that have made that list for you so far? I know, I know that travel and poker are two of them, you know, from the book. And obviously, I'm looking at that going like, Oh, I would love to play in some of those poker tournaments. But what are some other things that at least right now, right understanding to that they can evolve either in your younger self or in your older self? But what are things right now you've really solidified and said, look, Like this is a really good use of my money right now. This is something that absolutely like time and again gives me fulfillment and satisfaction.

12:50So I recently said that every event that I'm at, whether it's my birthday or a trip or going to the movies, is an excuse to hang out with people I love and meet new interesting people and connect. So it's like we're playing poker. It's like, well, it's nine people. It's our friends. We're hanging out. We're trying to destroy each other's wits, maybe make some money, but it's an excuse to hang out. Let's make an excuse to get together. we're going to a rocket launch to see SpaceX. Like, did I go alone? No, I went with five other and we talked about it and we talked, but I did it with friends. If I can enhance those experiences or create a playground where that happens, like those are the ones that are the most fulfilling experiences.

13:27And the activity may change. It's like, oh yeah, that's, that's a fun, this is fun, but it's just new setting, same real macro concept. Those are the things I'm trying to collect. I love the word you use, collect, because I would say that easily the concept that has stuck with me the most and the reason that a couple of my closest friends gave me your book in the first place was your concept of memory dividends. Right. And I know that this is like I could tell even from your writing. I'm like, he loves it. Like, this is good. Like, he's hit on something really good here. Could you explain a little bit about both how you arrived at this concept of memory dividends, what they are, and why you think they're so crucial to shaping how we think about money and experience?

14:13Yeah, I was kind of just wrestling with like, if you're going to spend all your money before you die, how does that distribute it throughout your life? Your body is going to deteriorate such that some of those experiences are going to disappear and some of those experiences are not going to be enjoyable anymore or you're not going to get as much enjoyment out of them. And it was kind of like, OK, but you may have more money so you can do more of them. Right. And so how does that offset? And I just thought, quite frankly, like when you put money in a bank and it pays you dividends or in a stock, et cetera, you're eventually going to consume that when an experience.

14:46But having an experience is not isolated. You don't forget it. And a lot of our self-concept, the things that we know today, and our joy comes from experiences that we've had in the past so that you don't just enjoy the experience while it's happening. You enjoy planning for it. There's anticipation. you have the experience right and then it's the remembrance of the experience your first kiss your first home run and i notice like when you gather with friends a lot of the conversation is about things that have happened and i noticed that that is an experience in itself and that produces dividends so these experiences produce an inflation protected return throughout your life nice you know i love that i love there we go i'm writing that one down would you rather have one ski trip in your 30s, or let's say two and a half ski trips in your 50s.

15:41Yeah. So like, I want to address that audience for a minute is the audience that's kind of in their 40s or 50s, because I didn't, I didn't see this in the book, but I love that you're reflecting on it now is that like, there are times in our lives where it seems very easy and straightforward. Like, of course, I'm going to do that in my 20s. That's what we do in our 20s. But you get to kind of this gray area of like, I don't know, between a saving for retirement or spending on experience or spending on my family, I'm not quite sure. Do you think that we right now, and when I say we, I mean, kind of like traditional financial advisors and thinkers and planners, do we get something wrong about how we talk to people about retirement planning?

16:25Because yes. A hundred percent unequivocal. Yes. Yes. So retirement planners are extremely conservative and solving for not running out of money, making sure you have maximum to cover these scenarios, et cetera. But what they should be asking their clients is what does a fulfilling life look for you to now to the grave? They lose sight of, or they ignore what is the money for? And so they always think, okay, the money's for 65 plus, right? And that's not true, right? It's for my life. I'm exchanging hours of my life in exchange for money to do the things that I want to do. And we really need to be in touch with what is the most fulfilling life for this person?

17:10These are the questions we need to ask them in order to give them the right advice. You know, a lot of people think their life is going to look like a Carnival Cruise commercial when they retire. And I lived at St. Thomas for like six and a half years. and a carnival cruise doesn't look like a carnival cruise commercial many people die like doing activities that they thought they could do just swimming or snorkeling and they have heart attacks because they're not healthy enough or you know etc and then they have a morgue on board you know it happens all the time and usually they've been so uh habituated into work when they get into like vacation mode they don't even know how to vacation they don't know they're so out of touch it's passed them by and you'll find most of them a little bit of sightseeing and a lot of going into the shops to buy t-shirts and trinkets for their, for their relatives.

17:56Yeah. I'll probably ask a couple of selfish questions here because like you also just hit on like some people are very bad at vacationing. And as, as my wife knows all too well and frustratingly, like I'm one of those people who doesn't know how to vacation. I don't know how to like take the time off and how to kind of sit with a nothingness. Do you have any kind of guidance for someone in that situation about like just even starting to practice how to kind of let go of this endless struggle to achieve or get something done or earn more money. Well, imagine somebody who hasn't gone to the gym and a New Year's Eve, they're like, I'm going to go into the gym.

18:32And then New Year's Day rolls around. And then by the end of January, all those people, you know, gyms have this predictable pattern where they're packed first month of January, and then it tapers off. And it's difficult, right? And the key is to stick with it. Don't quit. What you're doing by being productive in your job, learning these habits, repeating these habits over and over and getting into routines that are profitable for you is atrophying the rest of your life, right? So you're the equivalent of a couch potato in terms of living life and enjoying life and relaxing and having other things to do.

19:10And so if you go through 20, 40 years, sometimes even 50 years of doing that, and you go into retirement, you're just like, what the hell am I doing here? You know, you're like the guy in the gym, like, this is terrible. I'm not going to be good at this. I can't, I can't, I can't do this. I maybe I'll come in tomorrow. Okay, I can't do this. Wait, can I just hang around? Can I be a consultant for the rest of my life? You know, I got to go do something, right? And it's kind of sad because the younger you, when you were 20, there was a very clear line about like, yes, this is an exciting career, but the money was for something.

19:45Right. It was for you to go live your life. But we lose sight of that over time. We atrophy. We stop sprinting. We stop doing the things we love. We stop doing the things that connected us with other people that we enjoyed. And so we get into these habits and these skills and these other things that came to us naturally and fulfilling have atrophied. And we are the weaklings in life. That's well said. It doesn't make me feel any better about my current state. The advice is that stick with it. You can't give up. You have to lean into it. And eventually, just like the person who stays at the gym for three months, you break through, you start seeing results.

20:22You're like, oh my gosh, why didn't I do this more? You might even get addicted. and open up the world that was always available to you. Where do you fall down on now? I mean, so thinking about kind of, especially as you start to reflect on your own aging, one of the other really pivotal and kind of fresh takes that you have in your book that challenged a lot of traditional financial advisors' views and just people in finance is estate planning. And you had this very fresh take on charitable giving and how we go about estate planning. Can you reflect a little bit on that and what more people should consider as time starts to pass and people kind of want to pass on their wealth and be more deliberate about it?

21:06Right. So I think one of the most absurd things that we do, which is just osmosis from, you know, I guess maybe 10 ,000 years, is waiting till we die to pass on inheritance. It is perhaps the silliest thing I've ever heard of, right? The same physics that govern my body govern my children's body, and they are going to deteriorate, right? And the money is there for them to purchase experiences, right? To have a fulfilling life, okay? So one, if I'm waiting till I'm dying, right? Like two thirds of their life is passed by, depending on the age we had kids. Two, some of the experiences that that money was for, they will not able, won't have the ability to do it, right?

21:44Like just the lung capacity, bone density, muscle mass, et cetera, will have deteriorated over time. And so nobody says, hey, I want to be like Warren Buffett and be rich at 86. And inherent in that is an understanding that the utility of money declines as we age, right? So if you're waiting till you die to give a gift to your children, you're giving them a diminished gift compared to when they reach mental and physical maturity. And so people generally reach mental maturity. That means raw calculation power at 28 and physical maturity by age 33. That's it. And then you're in plateau and decline.

22:24Oh, OK. And so. And then you're done. You're done. And then by just saying, hey, I'm just going to leave it off to when I die to give my kids, it's kind of like this cop out of like not putting pen to paper and saying, what does my life look like? What do I want to spend? What is the amount I want to give my kids? And when is the best time to give it to the kids? And the same logic goes for charity. Life is now. Life is urgent. It would be a shame if the people that were supporting, I don't know, polio vaccines, You know, I want to save up my money and wait another 20 years before we we really work on this polio vaccine or donate the money to the polio vaccine.

23:04Like how many how many people die and suffer because of that? And I always say that there's no return greater than that of a human life or human lives. And so I don't care if you have an 8 percent, 10 percent, 15 percent market return, saving lives and the compounding effect of that is astronomical. Do you talk to your family openly about this? because like, so I mean, obviously, they kind of have a glimpse into your soul a little bit through the book, right? And are able to kind of see, especially because you realize you kind of wrote it as a diary, which is great. But I know a lot of families also have a really hard time talking about money with kids with one another.

23:41So do you have a relationship where you can openly talk about this with kids and partners? Yeah. So one of the things is after I wrote the book, I realized, holy shit, I'm an idiot. I have people here in my will that I want to give money to that are actually older than me. This is dumb. So I rewrote it. I took it out. I took the money that I would be giving to them and I gave it to them. Then with the kids, it's really delicate with the kids to tell them what they're getting when, because they're like, oh, I don't need to work. That was my next question was, how do you balance this? Well, dad's given me this gift, So I'm taking the year off.

24:19It's not an expert, but like eventually when they get to a certain age, they become aware and that like preparing them for, hey, this is what you're going to get or this is what it looks like now. These are skills you're going to need at a minimum to be able to handle this, right? Like because money is a tool, right? It's like a chainsaw, right? It can make things easier. It can cut your arm off, right? And so I give them enough time that they can prepare for it and understand it. Right. And not just be like, oh, my God. But most absurd thing that people are waiting to die to pass on an inheritance.

24:55No, trust me. And it's one of the ideas that will stick with me forever is, you know, if I have that level of disposable income at any point, because, I mean, even talking to people right now who are going through this incredible process to avoid a lack of clarity once they pass away. And I go, you know, there's actually a much easier way to avoid a lack of clarity. Correct. With how you want to just give it away right now. Like, oh, I couldn't do that. I go, why not? It seems so easy. It seems like you should do it. They're just like, you know, that's a great day. Everybody's gonna be cheering when I die that day.

25:26And I want to make it more special. And I don't know, I'm joking.