Die with zero? I’m on track for that, thanks Bill

Mark Dapin reckons he might as well jump on the Bill Perkins ‘Die with Zero’ bandwagon – he’s heading that way anyway.

By Mark Dapin

The problem with not having a proper job is that it is difficult to imagine giving up work. Writers tend to hope that when we retire, we’ll have more time to do what we love, which is, well… write.

Before I’d even heard of Bill Perkins’ book Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life, I knew I wanted to spend all my money before I died.

As it happens, this should be quite easy for me, as I haven’t got any money (see: being a writer, above).

I have no investments, no savings, and my partner and I do not fully own our house.

Dying with zero is an effort for Bill

But Die With Zero’s Bill Perkins was not a writer, he was an energy trader (whatever that is). Today, he is a hedge fund manager.

Therefore, although he has never done anything remotely useful, he has made, and continues to make, millions of dollars.

He tries to spend all his money while he is still alive, so as to get the most out of his life (or, as the book’s jargon elegantly puts it, to “maximise his net fulfilment over his net worth”).

In order to do this, Perkins goes around creating for himself “lifelong memorable experiences”.

I’ve got a problem with this kind of bucket-list thinking. I’ve never understood why some people suddenly decide they have to strap on a harness and go skydiving or bungee jumping before they die. Maybe they just want to get in some practice, since skydiving is probably as close to dying as you can get.

The reason that I haven’t done most of the things that I haven’t done is that I don’t want to do them.

Low expectations = high reward

My dad died with zero (which is part of the reason that I’ve got no money) and I hope that he got everything that he wanted out of life. I think that he probably did, because the main thing that he wanted to do was watch soccer.

My dad was an easy man to please (a goal for Liverpool FC normally did it for him) and I suspect that may be the key to net fulfilment (there are a couple of goals-and-nets soccer puns there, although I swear that they’re unintentional).

As a rule the lower you set your targets, the better chance you have of hitting them.

So, I don’t want to go into space with Richard Branson or (especially) Elon Musk.

But I do want to see more of my family, since I doubt many people ever died thinking, “I wish I’d spent less time with the people I love. It was kind of emotionally exhausting.”

On the other hand, I don’t particularly want to climb volcanoes with them.

Exciting adventure or unbearable torture?

As I have grown older, some experiences that might once have promised to be adventures have come to seem more like potentially unbearable tortures.

I would love to visit the icy wastes of Antarctica, for example – but only if they were, you know, quite a lot warmer.

That said, Perkins recommends that you do these things as soon as you can, in order to maximise the number of times you can revisit your best memories, a mental distribution which Perkins irritatingly refers to as your “memory dividend”.

His “investment advice in a nutshell” is “invest in your life’s experiences – and start early, start early, start early”.

This reveals him to be the kind of person who believes putting something in a nutshell means to say it three times – or a writer who is paid by the word.

A useful parent, not a rich one

The part of Perkins’ thinking that I agree with the most is that you should give your money to your children long before you die. He says that the peak age to come into an inheritance is about 60 years old, whereas the most useful age to receive money is between 26 and 35 years old.

I want my children to be taken care of – by their grandparents, preferably. And I’d like to see them comfortable while I’m still around, if only so they don’t spend the last years of my life hoping that I’ll pop off so that they can buy a house. So, yes, I’m going to try to give them all I can while I can enjoy watching them benefit from the fruits of my labour.

But at the heart of Perkins’ thinking is a sober calculation. According to the Die With Zero theory, we do not have to save as much as we imagine for our retirement, because we’re not going to be able to do as much when we retire anyway. Therefore, Perkins recommends we should start to “decumulate” our savings sometime between 40 and 60 years old.

“This means you will be spending more in your real golden years,” writes Perkins, “when you are in reasonably good shape in both health and wealth – between 45 and 60.”

This makes good sense to me. Unfortunately, however, I am already 60.

The corporate life ain’t no life for me

Die with Zero is actually quite an irritating book. Perkins thinks it’s clever to apply corporate double-speak to every area of human existence. In fact, this is his One Big Idea.

He writes of the “business of life”; “under-living” as a corollary of underspending; and your “personal interest rate” (simply too boring to explain). He hammers the same points again and again, like a multi-level marketer trying to bully a doddering pensioner into investing in his Ponzi scheme.

This doesn’t mean that he’s wrong – just that you probably wouldn’t be maximising your net fulfilment by spending much time with him.

At the end of the day, like all self-help books, the person that Die With Zero is designed to help the most is its author (who was born into money anyway).

Maybe if Perkins had done something more meaningful with his working life than making US$1.25 million in one week trading Goldman Sachs stock during the financial crisis in 2008, he wouldn’t be so concerned about making the most of his retirement.  

But, hey, what do I know?

I was always going to die with zero anyway.