Die With Zero, by Bill Perkins | Free Audiobook
The case against dying rich
The financial advice everybody grows up with is simple: work, save, invest, retire, and finally enjoy the money in your sixties. Bill Perkins looks at that plan and points out the obvious problem, which is that by the time the enjoying starts, the things you wanted to do with the money may no longer be available to you.
His argument is not that you should spend everything now. It is that money is a means to experiences, and experiences have a window: a backpacking trip you can take at twenty-five is not the same trip at sixty-five, whatever your bank balance says. So the book works through timing, asking what you actually want out of the years you have, and when each of those things should happen.
From there it goes somewhere most money books refuse to go: giving money away while it can still change somebody's life, including to your own children, rather than leaving them a sum in their fifties. Perkins narrates it himself, in five hours and eleven minutes that are closer to an argument than to a manual.
What makes this one worth five hours is that it reframes the whole subject. Most personal finance books optimise for the balance at the end; this one optimises for the experiences you get out of the money, and treats the date on the calendar as the variable that actually matters.
The chapters on giving money to heirs early, and on matching spending to your health rather than to a retirement age, are the ones that stick. Perkins narrates his own argument, and the conversational tone works for a book that is essentially a long case being made at you rather than a set of instructions.
It is also short enough to be a single sitting, which is not true of most books in the category.
The criticism you will find is that the whole thing can be summarised in a paragraph, and several reviewers do exactly that: save less rigidly, spend on experiences on time, give while it matters. Others point out that the advice assumes a level of financial comfort that not everyone has. Both are fair, and both are the price of a book built around one clear idea.
I still think it is one of the more useful things to listen to on the subject. If you want the opposite end of the same conversation, The Psychology of Money is on the site.
Die With Zero by Bill Perkins argues the opposite of standard retirement advice: that money is only worth what it buys you in experiences, and that those experiences have an expiry date.
It runs 5 hrs and 11 mins, read by the author himself. You can start it on a free trial, cancellable whenever you like.
Once you claim it through the trial the book stays yours to keep even after you cancel, and you spend the trial on whichever title you like. At five hours it is a single sitting.
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