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

Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dying with no money left, having spent it all on living. It sounds like an interesting concept – if money, a proxy for time, is a resource, can you optimize its use down to the last cent? The engineer in me was curious. I believed before reading this book that the only way to do that was to know for certain the date of your own death. After reading this book, I’m still of the same opinion. Perkins suggests that a person buy insurance and/or annuities to spend that last dollar, while doing any planned legacy giving while still alive, and while living life to the fullest. I don’t believe the insurance products he suggests all exist except in a theoretician’s mind, so practicality is a problem. As is risk. The author doesn’t always discuss additional risks taken while trying to limit a risk, like for instance your insurance company fails after you’ve paid for your annuity or insurance product. I found this disheartening in this book, as the author is an engineer who made his fortune in financial trading. I thought I found a kindred spirit.

And I did, in a way. The author begins the book describing his thinking being influenced by the book “Your Money or Your Life”, which explained how your time, or life energy, is traded for money, and you can think of your purchases as really being a chunk of your limited time on earth. He takes the concept to the conclusion that to be optimal, you should not waste time on making money that you won’t spend, hence the title of the book. But it ends up that the author isn’t done there. He continues down the optimization path by suggesting that life experiences and the memories they provide are what is really important in life, and to maximize these memories, you should spend on experiences while you can. For example, if you want to say you climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, it’s best to do that when you are younger and abler than risk not being able to do it later in life when you may not be able to physically. This seemed to be the main thrust of the book, not quite what the title leads you to believe.

There were two things I didn’t like about the book. One was the bragging. The author is wealthy and enjoys spending his money. He threw himself a birthday party right out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, flying friends to a Caribbean island and having a private concert. He is not psychologically opposed to spending. I tend to be, so I found this over-the-top example a bit too much. He used these examples to make his point, and he did.

Another thing I felt while reading this is what I would call “go-getter privilege”. There are risks that people who have generated wealth will take that other people will not. It is like there is a built-in insurance in the mind of a wealth generator, where they believe they can rebuild their wealth should any risk reduce their financial situation. I felt this strongly about the author, a multi-millionaire energy trader, as I read this book. It would be interesting to see if the author would have the same perspective if he was, say 20 years older and considering his wealth-making capabilities, facing age discrimination and no longer having his industry contacts, having followed his own advice and given away or spent most of his fortune. I think it would be quite a different book.

In summary, if you find yourself wealthy and want some logic behind upping your spending, this book is for you. For others, it is still a very interesting book, more a personal philosophy book than a finance book, making you think about your physical and financial capabilities at different times in your life and trying to make the best use of each.


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