I came to this book after I'd already been doing this work for years, which is either the worst time to read something arguing that people like me are the problem, or the best. I still haven't decided.
Die With Zero, by Bill Perkins. The argument, stripped down: most people die with far more money than they meant to, which means they spent years of their life earning something they never converted into living. The goal shouldn't be the biggest possible number at the end. It should be the smallest one, timed correctly.
You can see why that lands badly in my industry. I spend my days asking people to commit money now, for a benefit that arrives later, often much later, sometimes only after they're gone. A book telling you to spend it while you can is, on the face of it, an argument against everything on my business card.
I read it expecting to be annoyed. I was, for about forty pages. And then I wasn't.
The part that's right, and that I don't say enough
Perkins's strongest idea is that experiences have expiry dates.
Not everything you're deferring will still be available when you get around to it. You can take your parents somewhere at 34 in a way you cannot at 54, because the limiting factor was never your budget — it was their knees, their memory, their willingness to travel. The trip doesn't just get delayed. At some point it gets cancelled, and nobody sends a notification.
He calls the return on those experiences memory dividends: the thing you did once keeps paying out every time you or anyone else remembers it. Which means an experience bought early compounds longer, the same way money does.
That's uncomfortable for me, because the whole emotional engine of my work is later. Protect later. Provide later. Be ready for later. And a book that says some of your later has already quietly expired is a book I needed to sit with, not argue with.
The second idea I can't dismiss: giving to your children when they're 60 is not generosity, it's logistics. Money that arrives when your kids are middle-aged, established, and past the hard years arrives at the point of lowest usefulness. Perkins's version of a legacy is handing it over while it can still change something — a deposit, a business, a year without panic.
I've watched Filipino families do the opposite for decades. Sacrifice everything, transfer everything at death, and the receiving generation gets the money only after it has already survived without it.
The part that breaks in a Filipino household
Here's where I put the book down and started arguing with it.
Die With Zero is written for a reader whose parents are not a line item.
Its entire model assumes you're optimising one life: yours. Spend your own money on your own experiences, time it against your own health curve, hand what's left to your own children early. There is no chapter for the reader who is simultaneously funding a parent's maintenance meds, a sibling's tuition, and an emergency fund that four households will draw on.
For most of the people I sit with, "die with zero" isn't a plan. It's a description of what will happen anyway, by accident, whether they aim for it or not.
And the harder problem: Perkins can talk confidently about drawing your balance down to nothing because he's writing inside a system with a social safety net underneath it. Draw down to zero in the Philippines and the floor beneath you is your family, and the floor beneath them is a Facebook post.
So the book's boldest instruction is the one that translates worst. Not because Filipinos are worse at planning. Because the downside is held privately here, and it's held by whoever in the family has the steadiest income.
The twist I didn't expect
Now the part that changed how I talk about my own work.
If you read Perkins closely, he doesn't tell you to spend down and hope. He can't — his whole thesis depends on knowing you won't outlive your money, and nobody knows that. So he does what anyone rigorous has to do with an unknowable: he transfers it. He talks about converting some of your wealth into guaranteed income, and about insurance as the mechanism that makes an aggressive drawdown survivable in the first place.
Which means the book that reads like an argument against protection is actually built on top of it.
You cannot spend confidently on an uncertain timeline. You can only spend confidently on a floor. Protection isn't the opposite of living well — it's the thing that makes living well a decision instead of a gamble. Take the floor away and the rational response is to hoard, because the only defence you have left is a bigger pile.
I've been saying a version of this for years in a much clumsier way: fund, cover, fun. Perkins arrives at the same order from the opposite direction, starting from how to enjoy your life and reasoning backwards into why you need the floor. I found that genuinely clarifying, and slightly humbling, because he makes the case for my work better than my industry's own marketing does.
What I actually changed
Two things, and neither is a product.
I ask about the expiring things now. Not just "who depends on you" but "what were you planning to do with your parents, and when did you last check whether that window is still open." That question has changed more conversations than any illustration I've ever printed.
And I stopped treating an underspent life as a neutral outcome. I used to see a client with a big balance and no plan as safe. I don't anymore. Dying with a large unspent balance and a list of things you kept deferring is not a win. It's just a different kind of miss — quieter, more socially acceptable, and still a miss.
What I'd push back on, if I met him
That the number can be zero.
For a household where three generations are financially attached to one earner, the target was never zero. It's enough for the people still standing on your shoulders, and not one peso more hoarded out of fear. That's a harder number to find than zero. It moves, it depends on people who didn't choose to depend on you, and no book can compute it for you.
But the question underneath his is the right one, and I'm going to keep borrowing it:
What are you saving this for, specifically — and will that thing still be there when you get to it?
If you can answer both halves, you're doing better than most people I meet, including a lot of people with excellent financial habits and a trip they've postponed four times.
Margin notes is where I write about something I read, watched, or lived through, and what it did to how I think about money. Not reviews. Just the parts that stayed.
