Book Review: Die With Zero

This mediocre book is the best thing I have read for a while

There is a new pandemic spreading across the world. Not Covid-21 thankfully, but rather every single personal finance blog is reviewing Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. The author is a somewhat unrelateable natural gas trader/hedge fund manager/movie producer/high stakes poker player with a net worth of at least $65m.

The book is not great: it is readable but a bit light on content: I felt it could easily have been a Medium post instead of a book. The free apps offered by the author are not apps and neither do they work. The author wrote an entire book about how you should stop working once you have enough but seems to… still be working.

However, this book is perfect for people like us, people who understand the need to save and invest, people who are more like the ant in The Ant and the Grasshopper. It came into my life at just the right time.

The central message

There are actually three factors we need to take into account when planning our life: time, health, and money. By focusing too much on money, we risk making suboptimal decisions due to neglecting the importance of time and health.

On the one hand this is obvious: even a couple of decades ago I was complaining that as a university student I had lots of time but no money, and as a working stiff more money but no time.

But the health aspect is new. Perhaps it resonated so much this time because I am starting to feel my health decline. This last year has been tough, and my recent hospital stay brought home how important health and being able to move freely is.

Time waits for no man

This was also something I hadn’t been as aware of as perhaps I should have been. Perkins points out very rightly that some things are better at different times of your life. He mentions backpacking and staying in hostels: fun when you are 18, less fun when you are 45. On the other hand, visiting Las Vegas is more fun at 45 when you have enough money to enjoy it than it would have been as a broke 18 year old.

Time also makes a big difference with family: if you don’t spend time with your grandparents now, you might not get to in the future. Kids will only be five for 365 days. After that they will never be five again.

I used to play horsey with my granddaughter for hours: now my wrist bothers me if I do that, and she’d rather watch Netflix on her tablet. We still have fun together, but it’s a different kind of fun.

Investing in Experiences

Another interesting concept that I hadn’t seen before is the idea of investing in experiences, and reaping the dividends from those experiences in the form of memories, relationships, skills, and hobbies.

This seems to be true in my experience, in that I still get great pleasure from remembering time I spend with friends and family in the past.

Perkins recommends planning and having experiences more mindfully: assigning ‘experience points’ to various activities and aiming to maximise annual or lifetime scores. By being aware that some experiences are less fun or impossible as we get older (probably not a good idea to go bungee jumping when you are 85, for example), we can better plan out our life.

Putting it all together

Perkins suggests that the solution is to aim to maximise your experiences in life: taking account of time, health, and relationships, we can plan to have the best life imaginable while managing our money responsibly.

He recommends aiming to ‘die with zero’ as any money you have left over when you die represents experiences you didn’t have.

For children and charitable giving he recommends giving money immediately, when it is more needed and when you can actually enjoy the giving. This is actually something I have started doing already, giving money to my stepkids and grandkids because it is more useful for them now when they don’t have money than it would be in several decades’ time.

Who is the book for?

I get the feeling Perkins wrote this book for his friends and peers: people that made tens or hundreds of millions in their 30s or 40s. For them, money is not a limiting factor: their mindset and awareness is.

Likewise, for people who have their finances in order. People who are thinking about early retirement, or who have a robust saving and investing habit. For them, they might be missing the importance of time and health.

It would be pretty sad to lie on your deathbed with your hoarded millions and think about all the things you could have done when you were younger. That is the outcome Perkins is warning us to avoid.

But a lot of people do not have their finances in order. For them, this is all irrelevant until they deal with their money emergency.

A lot of our readers might find Die With Zero thought provoking. It certainly gave me a lot to think about. We actually hit our ‘number’ a couple of months ago (thanks to the insane stock market gains over the last 14 months or so), but of course as soon as we did I started thinking that it might be safer to have our number+50%, or ever 2x our number. I get the feeling that never ends. Reading this book has given me some reasons to break out of the accumulation cycle.

Die With Zero is a pretty quick read: I got through it in a couple of days of casual reading. There is even a Japanese translation available.

Anyone else read this? What did you think?