Why these authors want you to spend your money and die with $0 saved

Die Broke is the book where I first encountered the colourful quip about how the last cheque you write should be to your undertaker, and it should bounce. In other words, the closer you can get to spending all your money just as you die, the less you have to fork over to Uncle Sam—and for us, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).

Problem is, of course, that no one can accurately predict when they will die. As one unknown wag once remarked, retirement planning would be a cinch, if you just knew the day you’re dying.

Summary of Die with Zero 

So, it was of interest to me when an old college friend mentioned how much he enjoyed reading a book titled Die with Zero (HarperCollins, 2021), by Bill Perkins. My first reaction was that it sounded just like Die Broke, but I valued my friend’s opinion enough to check out a free copy on the Libby app and also on the paid book service Everand (formerly Scribd). The books have similar premises: there are trade-offs between time, money and health. Indeed, the Die with Zero subtitle is “Getting all you can from your money and your life.” 

Essentially put, we exchange our time and life energy for money, which can therefore be viewed as a form of stored life energy. So, if you die with lots of money, you’ve in effect “wasted” some of your precious life energy. Similarly, if you encounter mobility issues or other afflictions in your 70s or 80s, you may not be able to travel and engage in many activities for which you had been saving up. The “money as life energy” idea is most memorably articulated in another classic book about financial independence: Your Money or Your Life (Penguin Random House, 2008). 

But, what about the children? The issue of inheritance and leaving money to your heirs is deftly handled by Perkins in Die with Zero. The advice amounts to the old bromide that it’s “better to give with a warm hand than a cold one.” In other words, why not give them some of your money when they really need it, and you’re still healthy enough to enjoy their company, and presumably their gratitude.

Die with Zero review

After I read Die with Zero and started to write this column, I happened to chat with blogger Mark Seed of MyOwnAdvisor. Quite independently, he published a review of Die with Zero on the website Cashflows & Portfolios back in January 2024, along with a book giveaway promotion.

“It was ‘OK’ in terms of content,” Mark told me in an email. “Some of the writing was not very good, but the premise is good: avoid hoarding money you could otherwise gift, spend, enjoy, etc.” The review starts with the following quote from Perkins: “The real golden years—the period of maximum potential enjoyment because we have the most health and wealth—mostly come before the traditional retirement age of 65.” The review further says that most of us know this intuitively, but “so many of us might be giving up years of semi-retirement or retirement enjoyment, only to find out we’ve saved too much or put off many valuable experiences for far too long.” The reviewers liken the main premise and the notion that it’s better to give now rather than later, but they also found it quite repetitive and lacking a real recipe for implementing the Die with Zero mantra. 

Living the Die with Zero mantra

If you read and absorb the thesis, you may find that the book changes your day-to-day behaviour. This happened to me recently, when my wife and I spent a few days in Fergus and Elora, Ont., for a birthday celebration. Initially, we booked a tiny room at a correspondingly tiny price. Once we checked in, we asked to look at a more spacious and luxurious room. We had both read Die with Zero and, having discussed the book, mutually decided to upgrade our room, despite the price being roughly double. It’s a small example, but it may just be the beginning for us. 

In the course of researching this column, I also came across a related book, titled Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Penguin Canada, 2023), by Oliver Burkeman. It makes a nice complement to Die with Zero. If you haven’t already guessed, the 4,000-weeks timeline is roughly the number of weeks someone will live if they reach age 77. (See, 77 years multiplied by 52 equals 4,004.) The oldest person on record, Jeanne Calment, lived 6,400 weeks, having died at age 122. 

Planning to not live forever

The point is that our lives are distressingly finite, even if we do manage to stay alive for the biblically allotted “three score and ten.” Personally, I prefer the Moody Blues song “22,000 Days” for hammering home mortality. It was on the 1981 album Long Distance Voyager. Here are some of the relevant lyrics:

Let me go onto tomorrow
One day at a time
Now I know the only foe is time

22,000 days, 22,000 days
It’s not a lot, it’s all you’ve got
22,000 days
22,000 nights, 22,000 nights

Of course, 22,000 days is an underestimation of our earthly timespan: Multiply that by 365, and you get only 60 years. The songwriter, Graeme Edge, acknowledged this. According to Wikipedia, Edge’s rationale was this: “maybe the first five or six years you aren’t going to be worth much, and the last five or six years you aren’t going to be worth much, it works out that your useful life is about 22,000 days.”

But Edge more or less supports the Die with Zero worldview. He was surprised by the 22,000-day calculation, saying “because that doesn’t seem [like] much… If you do too much and have a day’s hangover, you’ve wasted 1/22,000 of your life. And all of a sudden the days start getting more valuable.”

The Four Thousand Weeks book isn’t as repetitive, and it’s well written and amusing in spots. Some of the more intriguing chapters are “Becoming a better procrastinator” and “Cosmic Insignificance Therapy.” I underlined way too many passages to flag here, but here’s a sample from the former chapter: 

“The core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done—that’s never going to happen—but how to decide most wisely what not to do… we need to learn to get better at procrastinating.” 

And, from a later chapter, Burkeman shares an “unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much… the universe absolutely could not care less.” 

Certainly, lines like that can put life into perspective. If you’re approaching milestones like 70, you could do worse than read and absorb both these books. It all depends on whether you are already familiar with the first book in this genre, Die Broke. If you haven’t read it, then definitely read Die with Zero. If you already know the concepts underlying Die Broke, then Four Thousand Weeks offers a fresh perspective on this topic. 

Read more Retired Money columns:

• Canadian seniors, watch out for these scams
• How to double your CPP income
• RRSP to RRIF, and LIRA to LIF: How it all gets done
• Are GICs a no-brainer for retirees?

About Jonathan Chevreau

As MoneySense’s Investing-Editor-at-Large, he is also author of Findependence Day and co-author of Victory Lap Retirement. Reach him at [email protected], where he is the founder of Financial Independence Hub.

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