Rich recreational poker player Bill Perkins wrote a book called "Die With Zero", which advocates spending or donating all of your money strategically so you're not left with much money at the end.
He argues that saving large sums of money into old age is wasteful, as you never got to have the full enjoyment of what you earned. He argues that even if you stretch your lifespan unexpectedly long, you will be too old and frail to enjoy most of your money anyway.
https://diewithzerobook.com/
What a monumental waste of human life, says multi-millionaire Bill Perkins. If you spend a lifetime working and die with lots of money left over, you’ve squandered a huge amount of life energy, bypassing the opportunity to enjoy your money — or to give it away — during your lifetime. Our lives are only as fulfilling as the sum of our experiences, Perkins argues, so the more time and money we invest in experiences during our lifetime, the richer our lives become.
Die with Zero will teach you Perkins’ techniques for finding an optimal balance between short-term pleasures and long-term rewards across your adult lifespan — a complex and ongoing optimization problem — how to maximize fulfillment while minimizing waste.
Although Americans are notorious for under-saving, millions of US households actually make the opposite mistake: they save too much for too late in life. For example, for heads of household between the ages of 70 and 74, the median net worth is $225,390, thanks to a lifetime of dutiful saving. What’s more, this wealthier half of Americans don’t start “decumulating” until they’re in their mid-70s — too late to enjoy certain pleasures — so even with rising life expectancies, millions of Americans are on track to have their hard-earned money outlive them.
On the surface, he would seem to be correct. Why not enjoy your money while in middle age (and still capable of doing a lot of fun things), rather than living a more frugal lifestyle and dying with millions anyway?
However, there are two big problems with his general idea:
1) If you have kids, you're screwing them. They may not have the same earning potential as you did (lesser ability, different opportunities than you had, etc). If you have a kid who would only be able to afford a lower-middle-class lifestyle on their own, you're doing them a big disservice by blowing your savings unnecessarily, just so you can "die with zero".
2) You don't know how long you're going to live. If you're incredibly rich, and you have no kids, sure, blow most of your money in middle age and then leave a few million behind for retirement. But for most everyone else, you could really screw yourself in your later years, and at that point you won't have the opportunity to earn it back.
I feel he has a decent point to a degree. I know many older people who have decided to "loosen up" in their later years, knowing their time left on earth is likely to be fewer than 20 years, but I haven't seen any with the desire to "die with zero".
Oh, and if that really is Perkins' goal, then maybe things are looking up for Phil Galfond.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Dan Druff
