Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Book Club: My 10 Favorite Takeaways from "Die With Zero" by Bill Perkins

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

How much is enough? When it comes to wealth, many of us chase the idea of accumulating as much as possible.  However, Bill Perkins' Die With Zero offers a different perspective: optimizing your wealth to maximize your life experiences. This book isn't just a radical rethink of conventional wisdom on wealth and retirement; it's a practical guide to making sure your money serves the purpose of enriching your life to the fullest. In this podcast, I’m sharing my top 10 insights from the book.  “Can you recommend a book for…?” “What are you reading right now?” “What are your favorite books?” I get asked those types of questions a lot and, as an avid reader and all-around bibliophile, I’m always happy to oblige. I also like to encourage people to read as much as possible because knowledge benefits you much like compound interest. The more you learn, the more you know; the more you know, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more opportunities you have to succeed. On the flip side, I also believe there’s little hope for people who aren’t perpetual learners. Life is overwhelmingly complex and chaotic, and it slowly suffocates and devours the lazy and ignorant. So, if you’re a bookworm on the lookout for good reads, or if you’d like to get into the habit of reading, this book club for you. The idea here is simple: Every month, I’ll share a book that I’ve particularly liked, why I liked it, and several of my key takeaways from it. I’ll also keep things short and sweet so you can quickly decide whether the book is likely to be up your alley or not. Alright, let’s get to the takeaways. Timestamps: (0:00) - Please leave a review of the show wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to subscribe and leave a comment! (4:15) - What do you really want out of this life? (4:34) - Making the most of your money (5:50) - Finding the sweet spot (6:03) - Maximize enjoyment (6:24) - The purpose of money (6:40) - Health and its experiences (6:53) - The golden years (7:13) - The Heffalump movie experience (7:52) - The window of opportunity (8:05) - The net worth peak (8:58) - BOGO 50% Off during my July 4th sale! https://buylegion.com/ Mentioned on the Show: Buy one supplement get one 50% off during my big July 4th sale! Plus, get a free $20 gift card on orders over $99. Go to buylegion.com to save now! Use coupon code MUSCLE to get double reward points!

Hi there, I'm Mike Matthews and this is Muscle for Life. Thank you for joining me today for a book club episode, a new installment in my ongoing series of episodes where I talk about a book that I've read recently and that I liked and explain why I liked it and who else I think will like it, if you may be one of those people who will like it. And I'm gonna share 10 of my favorite takeaways

from the book, which will help you get a sense of at least some of the core foundational concepts in the book. If you don't like any of the takeaways, you probably aren't going to like the book. If you like a lot of the takeaways, you probably will like the book. And so today's featured book is Die With Zero by Bill Perkins, which I really enjoyed. It really resonated with me, probably because it was kind of the right book at the right time for me. And it challenged me to think differently about my priorities in my life and my assumptions about what those priorities will be in the near future. And it challenged some of my assumptions about wealth and net worth and saving versus investing, especially in the context of time, like period of life and the health and energy levels that come

with different periods in our lives. I'm 39 and I have good health and I have good energy. Even if I do everything right, it would be naive to assume that I'm going to have more or less the same health and the same energy at 80 as I have now. And so anyway, to talk a bit more about the book, one of the reasons I want to recommend this book is regardless of how much money they have, many successful and financially responsible people spend a lot of their time figuring out how to get more money with the ultimate goal of getting as much money as they possibly can over the course of their lifetime. And most traditional financial advice sings from the same hymn sheet. The formula is pretty simple. If you can spend a few decades maximizing your income,

living well beneath your means, saving aggressively, investing cautiously. Eventually, sometime in the future, in your golden years, you can retire as a multimillionaire. Although you probably are not going to have even the vaguest idea of what to do with all your free time. And then ultimately, hopefully later rather than sooner, you can die rich. And this is a prescription that many people follow. I mean, I have followed it or at least accepted it to some degree. I've recommended it in the book, The Millionaire Next Door, which I still recommend as a book. I do think it has sound financial advice.

advice, but the overarching plan presented in that book and others like it is similar to what I just shared. Now, in Die With Zero, Bill Perkins offers another perspective. He offers compelling counterpoints to some of these traditional doctrines about wealth, which Perkins argues should be viewed merely as a means to an end, which would be a life well lived rather than an end unto itself. And although everyone can probably benefit to some degree from reading this book, I think that it has the most to offer to people who have achieved or who will achieve financial success, substantial financial success. Because while these people have or will have the resources to have many rich life experiences, they will also, many of them, often postpone or forego most of those opportunities, or at least many of those

opportunities to enrich their life because they are going to be too busy further enriching themselves, or they have become too averse to spending money that could otherwise be used to get richer. And spending doesn't necessarily just mean conspicuous consumption. Think of it as using money on whatever you want to use it on. It could be philanthropy. It could be helping your family. It doesn't have to be buying googahs and trinkets. And for some examples of these compelling counterpoints, let's get to my top 10 takeaways. you'd like to have and the number of times you'd like to have them. The experiences can be large or small, free or costly, charitable or hedonistic, but think about what you really want out of this life in terms of meaningful and memorable experiences. Two, quote, making the most of your money in the course of your life requires that, as another economist put it, wealth will decline to zero by the date of death. In other words, if you know when you

will die, you must die with zero, because if you don't, you are not getting maximum enjoyment, utility from your money. And what about the very real possibility that you don't know when you'll die? Modigliani, an economist, has a simple answer to that. To be safe, but still avoid needlessly leaving money behind, just think of the maximum age to which anyone can live. So a rational person, in Modigliani's view, will spread their wealth across all the years up to the oldest age to which they might live. And just a quick note there. Perkins talks a bit more about that last point and argues, I think convincingly, that you

should spend your money more aggressively earlier in your life when you have the health and energy to do many of the things that you want to do. Because inevitably, as you get older and your health and energy declines, you are not going to be able to spend your money nearly as aggressively because you're simply not going to be able to do a lot of the things that you could do right now or sometime in the near or maybe even distant future if you are very young. But anyway, getting to the third takeaway quote, there is a sweet spot in everyone's lifetime during which they can most enjoy the fruits of their wealth. The problem is that people continue

to save well past that optimal point. Four, quote, you should be focusing on maximizing your life enjoyment rather than on maximizing your wealth. Those are two very different goals. Money is just a means to an end. Having money helps you achieve the more important goal of enjoying your life. But trying to maximize money actually gets in the way of achieving the more important goal. Five, quote, the purpose of money is to have experiences. And one of those experiences for your kids is time with you. Therefore, if you are earning money, but not having experiences with your kids, you are actually depriving your kids and yourself. Six, quote, your ability to enjoy many experiences in life depends on your health, but money plays a part too because a lot of activities cost money, so you better spend the money when you still have the health.

have the most health and wealth mostly come before the traditional retirement age of 65. And those real golden years are the years during which we should be doing most of our spending, not delaying gratification. Eight, quote, if you have children, think about your own version of the Heffalump movie. So he shares a little story about watching this Heffalump movie with his daughter when she was young and how much he liked to do this. I think every year they would watch it. And then one day his daughter just didn't want to watch it anymore. She grew out of it and it made him a little bit sad that that experience was never going to happen again. So he tells you, or he asks you to think about your own version of the Heffalump movie. What one experience do you want to have more of with your children in the next year or two before that phase of their life and

your life is over? Nine, quote, because of this eventual finality to all of life's passing phases, you can delay some experiences for only so long before the window of opportunity on these experiences shuts forever. And 10 quote, you should find that one special point in your life when your net worth is the highest it will ever be. I call that point your net worth peak or just your peak. Why should there ever be a peak? Why can't your net worth just keep going up? First, remember that from my perspective, your overarching goal is to maximize your lifetime fulfillment, to convert your life energy to as many experience points as you can. And he talks

about what he means by experience points, but just think about experiences graded by points. It could be arbitrary on a scale of zero to 100, zero to 1000, whatever. And 100 out of 100 would be the absolute best possible experience you could have. Zero out of 100, the absolute worst. Doing that requires figuring out the optimal allocation of your money and free time to the right ages, given the inevitability of declining health and eventual death. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me do more of it, please do check out my sports nutrition company, Legion. Because while you don't need supplements to build muscle, to lose fat, to get healthy, the right ones can help. And that's why over 400,000 discerning folk now

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did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show, because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com, muscleforlife.com, and let me know what I can do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and

constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.