Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

I hope my message has at least jarred you into rethinking the standard and conventional approaches to living one’s life—get a good job, work hard through endless hours, and then retire in your sixties or seventies and live out your days in your so-called golden years. But I still ask you: Why wait until your health and life energy have begun to wane? Rather than just focusing on saving up for a big pot full of money that you will most likely not be able to spend in your lifetime, live your life to the fullest now: Chase memorable life experiences, give money to your kids when they can best use it, donate money to charity while you’re still alive. That’s the way to live life. Remember: In the end, the business of life is the acquisition of memories. So what are you waiting for?

we all have at least the potential to make more money in the future, we can never go back and recapture time that is now gone. So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.

What Good Is Wealth Without Health?

Realize that at every moment you have a choice. The choices you make reflect your priorities, so be sure you’re making those choices deliberately.

When you face asymmetric risk, it makes total sense to be bold, to grab the opportunity at hand. At the extreme, when the downside is very low (or nonexistent, as in the “nothing to lose” case) and the upside is really high, it’s actually riskier not to make the bold move. The downside of not even taking a chance is emotional: potentially a lifetime of regret and wondering What if? The upside of taking a chance always includes emotional benefits—even if things don’t work out. There’s a great sense of pride at having pursued an important goal wholeheartedly. If you’ve given something your all, you’ll get a lot of positive memories out of the experience no matter what happens.

That is what I mean when I say that we die many deaths in the course of our lives: The teenager in you dies, the college student in you dies, the single unattached you dies, the version of you that’s a parent of an infant dies, and so on. Once each of these mini-deaths occurs, there’s no going back. Maybe “dies” is a bit harsh, but you get the idea: We all keep moving forward, progressing from one stage or phase of our lives to the next.

Your biggest fear ought to be wasting your life and time, not "Am I going to have x number of dollars when I'm 80?

Start thinking more about how you use your limited time, your life energy, and you’ll be well on your way to living the fullest life you possibly can.

Research in psychology backs me up: People who spend money on time-saving purchases experience greater life satisfaction, regardless of their income.

No, the key takeaway, I now realize, is to strike the right balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.

The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end that’s all there is.

Nothing has a greater effect on your ability to enjoy experiences—at any age—than your health.

In other words, to get the most out of your time and money, timing matters. So to increase your overall lifetime fulfillment, it’s important to have each experience at the right age.

To fully enjoy life instead of just surviving it, you need to stop driving mindlessly and actively steer your life the way you want it to go.

don’t underestimate the risk of inaction. Staying the course instead of making bold moves feels safe, but consider what you stand to lose: the life you could have lived if you had mustered the courage to be bolder.

Or, if your out-of-pocket medical expenses amount to $50,000 per night (as they did for my father’s hospital stay at the end of his life), does it really matter whether you’ve saved $10,000 or $50,000 or even $250,000? No, it doesn’t, because the extra $50,000 will buy you one extra night, a night that might well have taken you a year’s worth of work to earn! Similarly, $250,000 saved over however many years will get wiped out in five days. I’m not suggesting that you should rack up large hospital costs with a plan to then stiff the hospital on those bills. What I’m saying is that you can’t pay your way out of high-priced end-of-life medical care; since uninsured medical care is so expensive, it won’t make any real difference for the vast majority of us whether we save for it or not. Either the government will pay for it or you will die.

Although we all have at least the potential to make more money in the future, we can never go back and recapture time that is now gone. So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.

what’s easy shouldn’t determine what you do. Don’t let difficulty dissuade you from living your best life!

At the high end, retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.8 percent of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. That’s more than 88 percent left over—which means that a person retiring at 65 with half a million dollars still has more than $440,000 left at age 85! At the lower end, retirees with less than $200,000 saved up for retirement spent a higher percentage (as you might expect, since they had less to spend overall)—but even this group’s median members had spent down only one-quarter of their assets 18 years after retirement.

The utility of money changes over time, and it does so in a fairly predictable way: Starting sometime in your twenties, your health very subtly starts to decline, causing a corresponding decline in your ability to enjoy money. Ability to Enjoy Experiences Based on Health Everyone's health declines with age. Wealth, on the other hand, tends to grow over the years as people save up more and more. But worsening health gradually constrains your enjoyment of that wealth as more and more physical activities become impossible to enjoy, no matter how much money you can afford to spend on them.

the senselessness of indefinitely delayed gratification.

First of all, yes, you can certainly leave money to the people and causes you care about—but the truth is that those people and causes would be better off getting your wealth sooner rather than later. Why wait until after you die?

You might think that as people get older, they spend money more freely out of the sheer desire to make the most of it before it’s truly too late. But the opposite tends to happen. In general, spending among American households declines as people age. For example, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that in 2017, average annual spending for households headed by 55-to-64-year-olds was $65,000; average spending fell to $55,000 for those between 65 and 74; and spending fell again to $42,000 for those 75 and older. This overall decline occurred despite a rise in healthcare expenses, because most other expenses, such as clothing and entertainment, were much lower. The decline in spending over time was even more acute for retirees with more than $1 million in assets, according to separate research conducted by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which analyzed data from more than half a million of its customers.

Life is not a game of Space Invaders—you don’t get points for all the money you rack up in the game—but many people treat it as though it were. They just keep earning and earning, trying to maximize their wealth without giving nearly as much thought to maximizing what they get out of that wealth—including what they can give to their children, their friends, and the larger society now, instead of waiting until they die.

The insurance companies that create annuities often make them seem like investments,” he wrote in a recent explainer about annuities. “But really they’re more like insurance.” Lieber went on: “Like insurance to stave off financial disaster, an annuity is something you purchase to guarantee that you won’t run out of money if you live a long time.” In fact, thinking of annuities as insurance makes them a lot more sensible than thinking of them as investments—because as investments they are not good at all. But that’s not their goal—their goal is to insure you against the risk of outliving your money.

you retire on your memories. When you’re too frail to do much of anything else

The main idea here is that your life is the sum of your experiences. This just means that everything you do in life—all the daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences you have—adds up to who you are. When you look back on your life, the richness of those experiences will determine your judgment of how full a life you’ve led. So it stands to reason that you should put some serious thought and effort into planning the kinds of experiences that you want for yourself. Without that kind of deliberate planning, you’re bound to just follow our culture’s well-trodden, default path through life—to coast on autopilot. You’ll get to your destination (death) but probably without having the kind of journey you would have actively chosen for yourself.

Between the Ant and the Grasshopper The idea that you retire on your memories runs completely counter to most of what we normally hear about retirement. As workers in the United States, we’re constantly getting the message that we must save for retirement, that we need to regularly sock money away into a 401(k) plan or IRA. That’s just the grown-up version of lessons we learned as kids about the need to save for a rainy day. The best-remembered variant of the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, for example, has the ant sitting pretty (and pretty smug) after harvesting his grain, while the grasshopper goes hungry after spending his whole summer playing. That retelling leaves no doubt about which of the two insects had done the right thing, and it sure wasn’t the fun-loving, shortsighted grasshopper. But don’t get me wrong: My point isn’t that we should be just like the grasshopper, failing to save for the winter of our life, or that any amount we spend on experiences is worth it because experiences are the stuff of life. That would be foolish. What I’m saying is that our culture tends to overemphasize the virtues of the ant—of hard work and delayed gratification—at the cost of other virtues. As a result, we fail to appreciate that the grasshopper was onto something, too. So, yes, the grasshopper would be better off to save a little—and, yes, the ant would be better off to live a little!

I’d rather die when the time is right than sacrifice my better years just to squeeze out a few more days at the tail end.