Die With Zero

Bill Perkins is an energy trader and hedge fund manager, but Die With Zero is not really a book about investing. It is a book about a different kind of optimisation problem: not how to accumulate the most money, but how to actually use it before you run out of time to enjoy it. His central provocation is that most people who are careful with money spend their whole lives getting better at saving and never get good at spending. They arrive at the end with more than they started with and fewer years left to do anything about it.

A caveat Perkins makes himself

Perkins is candid about who this book is written for. The questions it raises, whether to work more years for more money or step back sooner and spend more time with family, whether to take the trip now or wait until the portfolio hits the next milestone, are questions that require a baseline of financial stability before they even become meaningful. If you are still managing month to month with no savings buffer, the framework does not yet apply. The book assumes you have some means, some flexibility, and the luxury of actually choosing between options. It is addressed to people who have that latitude and are still not using it.

Perkins also makes a point that is easy to miss in a book full of examples involving expensive holidays and large investment portfolios: a significant number of the experiences that generate the richest memories cost very little. Reading the same book with your child every night for a year costs nothing. Cooking a meal together on a Sunday morning, teaching them a family recipe, an evening walk to the hawker centre with no particular agenda. These are experiences that compound in exactly the way Perkins describes, and the price of entry is almost zero. The memory dividend does not require a flight ticket.

Where having some budget genuinely extends what is possible is in the category of shared experiences that require a change of context. A two-night staycation at a hotel where the children get to swim in a rooftop pool and order room service creates a memory precisely because it is outside the ordinary. A long weekend in Johor Bahru or a few days in Bali is within reach for many Singapore families at a modest annual cost. A regional cruise, a week in Japan, a trip to a theme park in Tokyo or Hong Kong, these require more planning and more money, but they deliver the kind of shared experience that a family talks about for years. The point is not that you need to spend a lot. It is that deliberately setting aside some budget for experience, at whatever level is realistic for your situation, tends to produce returns that the same money spent on possessions rarely matches.

The biggest financial risk is dying with too much

Most personal finance advice is organised around one fear: running out of money. Perkins argues the opposite risk is equally real and almost never discussed. If you spend your working life deferring everything until retirement, you may arrive at retirement with a full account and a diminished capacity to enjoy it. Money you never spent is, in the most literal sense, wasted.

This lands differently in Singapore, where the cultural script around money is almost entirely about accumulation. CPF, property, savings. The assumption is that more is always safer. Perkins does not argue against saving. He argues against saving without a plan to spend, which turns out to be most people’s actual situation.

Memory dividends

Experiences do not just happen and disappear. They pay returns in the form of memories, and those memories resurface for the rest of your life. A trip you took at thirty is still paying dividends at sixty. A concert, a holiday, a meal with people you love. These compound quietly in the background long after the moment has passed.

The implication is that spending on experiences earlier in life generates more total return than spending on the same experiences later, because you have more years of memory ahead of you. This plays out in distinct phases across a family’s life, and each phase calls for a different kind of experience.

When your children are very young, below three or four, the honest truth is that the experiences are largely for you. A trip to Bali or Tokyo with a toddler is a beautiful thing, but the child will not carry those memories. You will. That is still worth doing, but you are spending on your own memory of being young parents somewhere new with a small person who made everything feel different.

Then comes the window that Perkins’s framework captures most cleanly: the years when everything feels genuinely magical to a child. Roughly five to ten years old, when a Disney character is not a person in a costume but something close to real, when a cable car ride or a night safari is a genuine event, when the world is large and full of wonder and they have not yet developed the reflex to be unimpressed. The trips you take during this window hit differently, for them and for you. That window is shorter than it looks.

By the teenage years, the dynamic shifts. Theme parks may not land the same way. What works is different: more adventure, more autonomy, trips where they feel treated as almost-adults. The experience is still worth investing in, but it requires a different kind of planning and a different kind of presence from you.

The health, wealth, and time triangle

Perkins maps out three resources that determine what you can actually do with your life: health, wealth, and time. The problem is they rarely all peak at once. When you are young, you have health and time but no money. In your peak earning years, you have money and some health but very little time. By retirement, you may have money and time but your health is starting to limit what you can do with both.

The window where all three overlap is narrower than most people assume. Someone who retires at sixty-five with a substantial portfolio but bad knees, a slower metabolism, and friends who are also slowing down is not in the same position as someone who took that same money and used it at fifty.

There is also a spending reality that most retirement projections ignore: people naturally spend less as they age. At eighty, most people do not have the energy or appetite for long-haul travel, adventure, or the kinds of experiences that cost real money. The portfolio you were so careful to protect may simply sit there, largely untouched, because the person who could have enjoyed it is no longer the person you are. Perkins is not saying spend everything now. He is saying be honest about which window you are actually in.

Experience buckets are tied to life stages

Some experiences are only really available at certain points in life. Backpacking solo through Southeast Asia is a different proposition at twenty-two than at fifty-two. Learning to surf, running a marathon, taking a sabbatical to try something completely different. These are not impossible later, but the version of the experience changes. The body is different, the social context is different, and often the appetite is different.

Perkins uses the idea of buckets: groupings of experiences that belong to a particular season of life. The practical implication is that deferring certain things is not neutral. You are not preserving the option. You are letting it quietly expire.

This applies to couples as much as it does to families. The trips you take as two people, in your thirties, forties, and fifties, before the body starts setting limits on what is possible, are their own category entirely. A hiking trip at forty-two is not available to you at sixty-seven in the same form. An anniversary week somewhere while the children are with grandparents is a different experience than the same destination at seventy with slower days and earlier nights. These do not happen by accident. You have to decide to make them happen, because every year you are busy, there will be a reason to wait one more year.

In Singapore, the broader pattern is families who spend years talking about the big overseas trip and keep postponing it because the timing is never quite right, until the children are teenagers and not particularly interested in travelling with their parents anymore. The option did not disappear. It expired.

Give money to people when it matters most

Most wealth transfer in families happens through inheritance, which means it arrives when the recipient is already in their fifties or sixties and has largely figured out their financial situation. Perkins argues this is backwards. A lump sum matters far more to someone in their twenties or thirties, navigating early careers, young relationships, and the particular uncertainty that comes before life gets fully structured, than to someone at sixty-five who has already made their major decisions.

The most meaningful version of this is not always financial in the conventional sense. Sponsoring your twenty-something child’s trip through Japan with friends, or a ski holiday they could not otherwise afford, is giving them a formative experience at exactly the age when it will shape who they become. Helping with a housing downpayment is another form of the same thing: you are not just transferring money, you are enabling them to build a home and start a family earlier than they could on their own.

Perkins also points to a practical mechanism for structuring this. Setting up a trust or making gifts while you are still alive means the money is no longer legally yours. That clarity then frees you to spend down what remains for yourself. You have already taken care of the people you wanted to take care of. The rest is yours to use.

Your life is not one long run, it is a series of seasons

Perkins uses the concept of nine lives: the idea that a single human life contains multiple distinct chapters, each with its own circumstances, energy levels, relationships, and possibilities. The person you are at thirty is not the same person you will be at fifty, and they do not want the same things.

The planning implication is that you should not manage money as a single long arc ending in retirement. You should think about what each season of life actually requires, and allocate accordingly. Saving aggressively through your thirties to spend in your forties is a legitimate strategy. Saving aggressively through your sixties to spend in your eighties may not be, depending on what you want your eighties to look like.

The fear that keeps people holding on

Perkins spends time on why people struggle to spend even when they have enough. The two fears he identifies are not irrational: the fear of a catastrophic medical event wiping everything out, and the fear of living longer than the money lasts. These are legitimate concerns. But he argues that most people treat them as reasons to hold onto every dollar indefinitely, when in fact both risks have specific tools designed to handle them.

The medical cost fear is real, but it is also the fear with the clearest solution. Major illness and hospitalisation in Singapore can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. No investment portfolio should be expected to absorb that out of pocket. That is precisely what a comprehensive hospitalisation plan is for. If you have adequate coverage, a catastrophic health event does not have to liquidate your life savings. The insurance exists to ring-fence that risk so the rest of your money can be used for living.

The longevity fear, the worry that you will outlive your money if you spend too freely, has its own answer in the form of annuities. An annuity converts a lump sum into a guaranteed income for life. You cannot outlive it. In Singapore, CPF LIFE functions as exactly this: a longevity insurance product that provides monthly payouts for as long as you live, regardless of how long that turns out to be. If you have sized your CPF LIFE payout correctly, or topped it up to a level that covers your baseline expenses, you have effectively neutralised the longevity risk. The rest of your portfolio, the investments sitting outside CPF, no longer needs to be hoarded against the possibility of reaching ninety-five with nothing left. You can spend it down with more confidence, because the floor is already built.

Perkins’s point is that these are not reasons to hold on. They are problems that insurance and annuity products were specifically designed to solve. Treating them as reasons to keep everything locked up and untouched is paying twice: once for the coverage, and again in the form of a life you did not fully live.

Zero is a direction, not a destination

The title is deliberately provocative. Perkins is not literally saying spend every dollar before you die, or that leaving anything behind is a mistake. He is saying that dying with significantly more than you needed is a sign that you over-saved at the expense of living. The goal is to end close to zero: having extracted genuine value from the money you earned, rather than having optimised the number on a statement that nobody else will ever spend on your behalf.

He is also clear that zero includes giving, not just spending. Money directed toward people and causes that matter to you, while you are alive to see the impact, counts. An inheritance left to children you will never see spend it does not.

Die With Zero is a book that makes you uncomfortable in a useful way. It does not tell you how to save or invest. It asks a harder question: when exactly are you planning to actually use what you have been building? Most people do not have a good answer. The book at least forces you to think about one.