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Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life—A Revolutionary Approach to Maximizing Life Experiences Over Accumulating Wealth
Budgeting & Money Management, Money Management Personal Finance
Bill Perkins, a hedge fund manager, argues that most people over-save and under-live, dying with money they could have turned into meaningful experiences. The book lays out a framework for spending deliberately across life's stages, including timing experiences while health allows, giving to children and charities while alive, and planning to draw savings down rather than hoard them.
- Release Date
- 2020
- Length
- 240 pages
- Publisher
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Our Review
About the book
Bill Perkins, a hedge fund manager, argues that most people over-save and under-live, dying with money they could have turned into meaningful experiences. The book lays out a framework for spending deliberately across life’s stages, including timing experiences while health allows, giving to children and charities while alive, and planning to draw savings down rather than hoard them.
Our review
A personal finance book that tells you to spend more, and makes a surprisingly rigorous case for it.
Perkins flips the usual money advice on its head. Instead of maximizing your final net worth, he wants you to maximize lifetime fulfillment, treating money as a tool for experiences that have their ideal windows. His most useful idea is the time bucket exercise: map the decades ahead and notice which adventures belong to your thirties and which simply will not happen at seventy-five. He also makes a sharp argument for giving inheritances earlier, when they can actually change a child’s life.
The book works best as a corrective for diligent savers who struggle to enjoy what they have built. It is less helpful for readers who are struggling to save at all, and Perkins acknowledges this only briefly; his examples sometimes reflect a comfortable vantage point. The practical mechanics of drawing down savings safely are also lighter than the philosophy, so you may want a financial planner for the details. As a provocation that reframes what money is for, though, it is genuinely valuable.
What we loved
- A fresh, contrarian frame on saving and spending
- The time bucket exercise is memorable and practical
- Thoughtful case for giving to loved ones while alive
Keep in mind
- Less relevant for readers without a savings cushion
- Light on the technical details of safe withdrawal
Read it if you like
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, disciplined savers who forget to live
The verdict
A bracing, persuasive reminder that money unspent is life unlived; best read by people who already save well.
