Die with Zero by Bill Perkins is a book that talks about the aim of getting all you can from the money you earn. You shouldn’t earn more since that would mean wasting your valuable life on accumulating wealth you will never spend. Why bother? Instead, spend your money down to experience life to the fullest while being careful to never run out before your time comes. Want to leave some to kids or charities? Why not donate the intended amount before you croak? Many interesting points that makes you think about how to structure your life.
How’s it going everybody this is peter bush i got multiple comments on youtube and even on instagram referring to this particular book die with xero on the surface it’s a very catchy title it makes you want to read it to figure out what the author is saying and how you exactly die with zero today i’m gonna go over the main points of this book and also suggest if
You should actually buy this book and read it for yourself this video is brought to you by moomoo you can get five free shares of stock each of them valued up to thirty five hundred dollars just for opening up account and depositing various amounts exclusive to this channel on top of all these shares that you’re gonna get you can get an additional share of amc stock
Guaranteed as long as you deposit a hundred dollars before february 7. check out my referral link down in the video description below the idea is simple you want to enjoy all of your money while you are alive not be in the grave with the most money and then when you die all of this money gets divided up maybe according to your will maybe not it may not end up in the
Right hands with your particular intention so it’s best to spend your money donate it or give it to the intended people while you’re still alive one of the main concerns with dying with xero is what about the children you might want to leave some for them and the premise of this book is you should actually give it to them while you’re still alive maybe not to the
Point of spoiling them so you might want to set up some kind of structure where they get invested more and more as they age more what about charities rather than dying and leaving a really really huge amount why don’t you give the money while you’re still alive rather than have like millions and millions of dollars that you just kind of sucked away and made bigger
And bigger how did i with zero this book says that you need to have a more accurate estimate of your life expectancy based on age race if you smoke if you are obese what kind of health problems you have what kind of health problems your parents have or your grandparents have you enter this into various calculators online and it will pop out a number for me it says i
Think it was like 81 for one calculator and 84 for a different calculator but for this life expectancy thing how can you believe this totally right you could get run over by a bus if no accidents happen to you you could still live much longer than this and i’ll talk about more about this a little bit later one interesting thing that this book talks about is that your
Burn rate actually steps down quite significantly as you get older and older and this is kind of morbid it throughout numbers like if you’re in the 50s you spend let’s say 60k a year 10 years later in your 60s you’re probably going to spend about thousand dollars less even with healthcare factored in and then in the 70s you’re going to spend yet another 10 000 less
Personally i actually have some hobbies that i no longer want to do because i feel like if i break a bone or something like skateboarding or snowboarding i just don’t want to get hurt and crack my skull or something whereas in my 20s i’m like oh yeah let me you know daredevil you know i’m like jumping on half pipes and things so when you factor this into trying to
Use all your money until it reaches zero you actually have to spend a little bit more up front when you’re younger to kind of compensate for your lower expenditure when you’re older you can also remove a little bit of risk by buying annuities where you pay a lump sum in and you’re gonna get some amount per month every single month until the day you die the premise
Of this book is to get the most out of life you have a certain window of opportunity to participate in certain activities for example snowboarding let’s say it’s 20s to 30s cruises you can participate them in your 20s and i personally have but you can do this just as well all the way up to 80s but maybe because you can do them all the way up to 80s maybe you don’t
Want to do your cruises now you just save them for later so you at least maybe you have some other stuff to do when you are like 70 or 80 years old you should spend more money today in activities even though sometimes it might be splurging to get the maximum enjoyment and maximum amount of memories you should spend them at the right time at the right age now when
You get a certain experience let’s say you went on some trip right you’re always going to recall it maybe it’s like a really really good trip like for me i went to the caribbean’s i always remember about laying on this black sand beach and how warm it felt with the waves kind of gently hitting me and then i’m just kind of like sliding around that was like in pure
Heaven and i remember it many many times that caribbean trip cost me probably like two thousand dollars back when i was in my twenties every single time that you think about how great it was you get a boost of experience points the idea is to collect as many of those as you can the experience part of it when you’re actually experiencing it is one amount of enjoyment
That you get but you also get little bits and pieces of enjoyment trailing off over the years so then you can add all those up and it becomes a really really big amount of enjoyment before you go i should spend all my money for experiences today in various points of the book it did mention that for people that aren’t earning more than what they need this actually is
Not possible to spend more today because you need to save money for your future still it’s for people that are saving too much i overall enjoyed this it’s a very very quick read there are a handful of good ideas in here but i feel like there could be a little bit more a little bit more content in here maybe like 50 more and then i would feel like the value of this
Book is there it panders to a really large audience it always goes do this but not to an extreme you should not spend everything neither should you save everything but do something in between but it doesn’t really name exactly where in between so it’s like okay don’t do the extremes do something right in the middle whenever you have an author say something like
This something very very bold and you pick up the book and you read it right you want them to practice what they preach and although there’s an example in here talking about the author having a very very lavish party that spent a significant portion of his net worth what i personally want to know is if he actually spent down his net worth nowhere in this whole
Book does it talk about that where the book essentially says that somewhere around midlife 40s or 50s you should be starting to spend down your network you reach a certain peak right let’s say he has like 5 million 10 million or whatever million right it should be going down instead and what i want to know is is his net worth actually you know on heading its way
Down it’s on the downward slope he doesn’t actually have to review that his actual net worth but i want like a like a little acknowledgement it’s like yes i personally am doing this not just an example of a lavish party because even if you have the lavish party you could be earning you know 10 times that amount per year and your net worth would still be going up
I’ve actually talked about making your net worth go down before i had a talk with a retired person who passed away since then and i had a conversation with him where he talked about you actually at some point need to spend down your entire life savings a little bit right it actually doesn’t make sense to just keep on earning all the way up until you’re dead all
The way up until you’re in the hospital bed and you’re still earning and your net worth still keeps on going up you can leave this to your spouse leave this to your children but essentially if you leave all this to whoever you don’t get to experience all the spending of it spending not in the sense of buying stuff nor is it even buying experiences for yourself
But spending in the sense that when you gift the money to these people you are spending it and if you gift it while you’re still alive you may reap some rewards of satisfaction where you’re like yes you know i i did this i i actually gave it to them in person making your net worth go down is very disconcerting especially when you have been making your net worth go
Up the past three or four decades right all of a sudden you’re like okay you got to force yourself to be a spender rather than a saver you save a lot like for myself i save like almost 100 of my income i like derive a lot of value out of credit card churning and things like that and i spend that as my daily spending so then essentially everything that i actually
Earn on youtube or whatever it just goes right in the bank and it just makes my network you know trickle up higher and higher so now let’s say you’re faced with trying to spend your net worth down this is very very difficult to do and it probably requires some practice and some kind of reassurance that you’re not going to run out of money before you die let’s say
You’re not trying to make it go to zero all the way maybe let’s say you want to spend down half of your net worth for some people though i think spending this money down might be more stressful than it’s worth because if you’re stressed then maybe you’re going to die sooner because you’re just worried that you’re going to run out of money here’s another critique
About estimating when you will actually die let’s say you do all the calculators it says your estimated lifespan will be 81 years old 84 years old but you have to realize this is a bell curve distribution the average person is going to live till 81 but there’s gonna be a few percent of people and it might just be you that is gonna live till 90 or 100 and if you
Do this if you try to spend it to zero right until 81 you will run out of money and then you’re going to have another 10 years to live what are you going to do in this case well maybe you can save more money you can estimate that you’re going to spend down to zero when you’re 90 years old if you do this you’re not going to be completely efficient because if you
Plan for dying at 90 but you die at 81 instead you’re gonna have nine years of living expenses that is still unspent due to the inaccuracy of estimating when you will actually die you are then forced to have some kind of margin of safety and having the safety means you will not die with exactly zero far from it because if you want some kind of comfort that you won’t
Run out you’re gonna have to have a pretty large margin of safety 10 years maybe 20 years because you might just live that much more longer medicine might get better all of a sudden and boom you know you live longer just like that still even with all this critique i think the idea is sound dying with xero just kind of pushes you to spend a little bit more while
You are alive rather than saving every single penny this book is called die with zero by bill perkins it’s around thirteen fourteen dollars on amazon i’ll leave a link to that down in the video description below thanks for watching this video don’t forget to give me a like and subscribe for more you
Transcribed from video
How to Die with Zero By BeatTheBush