Die With Zero - Review

I am reading Bill Perkins' book Die With Zero and thought I would share a few meaningful quotes I came across. If you are not familiar with the book, the quick synopsis is that Bill Perkins, a hedge fund manager, challenges traditional views on wealth, advocating for "maximizing your life enjoyment rather than on maximizing your wealth". The book emphasizes intentionality when balancing earning, spending, and saving to ensure a fulfilling life while avoiding regret over unspent wealth.

Many of these quotes stand on their own, but I will add my thoughts where indicated.

Let's begin with some of those quotes:

"Besides, it is much smarter to spend your healthcare money on the front end (to maintain your health and try to prevent disease) then to spend it at the end, when you get a lot less bang for every buck you spend."

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 59

Solid gold. Here is another:

"This kind of blanket denial explains why so many people are willing to spend tens of even hundreds of thousands of dollars to prolong life for just a few more weeks. Think about it: That's money that they spent years or decades working hard for. They gave up years of their life while healthy and vibrant to buy a few extra weeks of life when they are sick and immobile. If that's not irrational, I don't know what is!"

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 72

Love this idea. It is the underlying principle driving my conversations with patients on changing the way we approach death.

"... A person's ability to extract real enjoyment out of [a] gift declines with age. This happens for exactly the same reason your own ability to convert money into enjoyable experiences diminishes after you get past a certain age. And for a whole host of activities, you need a certain minimum mental and physical state to enjoy them all."

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 86

"You always get more value out of money before your health begins to inevitably decline."

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 87

"A person's ability to extract enjoyment from their money begins to decline with age. What does this mean? The idea becomes crystal clear when you look at a person on their deathbed. Too weak and fragile to move their body, perhaps needing a feeding tube and a bedpan for some of their most basic functions, the person on their deathbed can't do much of anything except think back to what they've already done in their life. You can give them a private jet to fly anywhere in the world - but they're just not going anywhere."

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 109

"To some extent, the rate of physical health decline is up to you. The better you maintain your health, the less steep your decline. For example, the lung-function curve for nonsmokers is a lot flatter than the curve for smokers. The better your health in a given year, the more you will be able to enjoy your experiences that year. So, yes, you will decline - but you have a say in the shape of that decline! That's a good thing, because the better you're able to maintain your health during your lifetime, the higher your lifetime fulfillment score will be."

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 114

" The utility, or usefulness, of money decline with age."

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 115

"Money is nearly worthless at the very beginning and the very end of life."

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 115

I love me my pictures, so I thought I would include this one using triangles to express the relationship between 3 factors (health, time, and money) at different time points in life:

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 120

"In fact, health is actually a lot more valuable than money, because 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."

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 121

This is a graphic I really liked from the book showing the utility of money across age:

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 163

For this next quote I took 4 pages of really solid material and cut it down to it's most powerful messaging. It is long but really make the point:

"In our three-pronged model - where fulfillment from a single experience is a function of health, money, and free time - health is the single biggest factor (or multiplier) affecting the size of a person's lifetime fulfillment curve: Our simulations show that even a small permanent reduction in health at some point in a person's life amounts to a large reduction in the person's life time fulfillment score... When adjusting the health input, we are adjusting the rate at which your body will decline. How fast your body's health declines depends on how in shape (or not) you are now. So if you are 2 percent from optimal health now, you may be 20 percent from optimal health 10 or 15 years from now. Basically, there is a compounding effect to being in poor health... Small changes in health can lead to a negative compounding that has enormous impacts on your lifetime fulfillment and experience points. The good news from all this: If you take even small steps to improve your health now (improving even 1 percent and avoiding the negative compounding effects), you will have vastly increased your total experience points. There is a clear implication in this observation, and it's one you've doubtless hear before: People of all ages should be spending more time and money on their health... Earlier investment in health would actually yield greater lifetime fulfillment. Preventative steps like eating right and strengthening muscles helps you keep your health as high as possible for as long as possible - and makes every experience more enjoyable... Better health does't just give you a better retirement years from now - investing in your health is investing in every single subsequent experience!"

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 123-126

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

• Bill Perkins Die with Zero, page 188

Another thing worth sharing from the book is an app that puts a count down timer on your phone for when you are expected to die. Very memento mori. Perkins suggests an app that is no longer available on the app store, so I went with a random app called "Countdown" that allows you to put a widget on your home screen telling you how many days you have remaining... momento mori indeed!

And finally he suggest two calculators to calculate your expected day of death based on actuarial data. The first is https://www.longevityillustrator.org/. The second is https://www.livingto100.com/calculator.

Here is a quick snapshot of my results. Taking 90 y/o as being my 50/50 on the longevity illustrator note the 11 year difference in predicted lifespan.

Longevity Illustrator:

Living to 100:

Wishing you lots of longevity no matter what the algorithms say!