Book: 20250602 to 20250625, "Die With Zero" by Bill Perkins

20250603 - 1 Optimize Your Life

No, you cannot get me to work two hours just to buy that shirt! p11

It's natural to be thrifty if income is low.

Many psychological studies have shown that spending money on experience makes us happier than spending money on things. p13

Why? It force us to pay attention to the moment. If we can pay attention to the moment all the time, then we stop living on autopilot. From big data training point of view, that means we will not treat daily activities as noise but real data.

20250604 - 2 Invest in Experiences

The main idea here is that your life is the sum of your experiences. p22

It's wrong. Based on the book "Think, fast and slow", we only remember the peak points and the end.

So we should not pay much attention to general experiences.

I realized that you retire on your memories. p23

This is against "live in the moment", which doesn't rely on our memories.

We don't need great memory to stay happy after retirement.

By conscious, we know that we are going to die in dozens of years; by subconscious, we feel that we will live forever. When driven by Autopilot, we are controlled by subconscious.

Why old people like talking about the events of their young age? Their life after 30 don't have much new activities.

20250604 - 3 Why Die With Zero?

Why didn't retires spend much of their money?

I believe it's for the potential black swans.

We don't know what's going to happen. For example,

What if our children or grandchildren got cancer and need half million dollars for the cure?

What if WW3 broken out?

What if some new medicine to prolong our healthspan is invented but cost one million dollar?

We need buffer to handle those black swans. The problem is that how much buffer make us feel safe?

If we only need to spend the passive profit our asset make for us.

20250615 - 4 How to Spend Your Money Without Actually Hitting Zero Before You Die

Annuities is designed for lazy people. A much better way is to split investment into SP500 index fund and government bonds.

The key is facing death bravely, and then make a plan.

20250616 - 5 What About the Kids?

The enemies of rational thinking: Autopilot and Fear. p84

26 to 35 is the best age for kids to receive financial support from their parents.

20250617 - 6 Balance Your Life

Is it worth it to spend $50 per week on laundry service? p127

Only if we don't waste spare time. But the truth is, every hour we saved from laundry service will most likely be wasted on something like watching a screen.

So this is not a good example.

A much better one is entering semi-retirement life.

However, there are two points we need to consider.

1. Pay someone to do something means utilize other people's labor power actively.

Normally we only get other people's passive labor power.
This itself is change of our subjective experience.

2. Money could be useless if our wealth exceeds some threshold.

Use useless resource to exchange for useful resource, could be good deal.

External experience maybe is not that important, but more or less can bring valuable memory to us.

If we have enough wealth, then it's worth to grab some.

Regarding the famous marshmallow test, I think it's more about uncertainty, instead of delaying gratification.

How do I know whether I will get that extra marshmallow if wait for 15 minutes? Maybe there is still one marshmallow. Maybe the current one will also disappear.

Everyone pursues certainty. If we don't trust others(parents, school, friends, company, government, society, etc.), then it's very difficult to make long term plan. This is one of the major reason that developed countries have higher social productivity.

20250624 - 7 Start to TimeBucket Your Life

There is something not right. Or else, the people born in abundant families should own most valuable experiences, and be satisfied with their lives.

Experiences only be precious when we pay full attention to them.

Zen masters can get wonderful experiences from daily activities. It's not good rely on strong external experiences.

20250625 - 8 Know Your Peak

By maximizing our life experience, are we trying to convince ourselves that we thrived?

Why does it make us happy?

It's good point that we should spent more after 45, and take more annual leave.

20250625 - 9 Be Bold Not Foolish

Bill Perkins may have survivorship bias.

Most of people live on autopilot. To them, the risk is much larger than Bill Perkins's understanding.

But live on autopilot is the major error that we can make in our lives, that's the problem we should solve first.

20250625 - Conclusion