Bill Perkins on Die With Zero: Memory Dividends, Time Buckets and Net Fulfillment Over Net Worth

High-Level Overview

Lewis Howes talks with Bill Perkins, a hedge fund manager who has traded mostly natural gas and, as Howes notes, has brought in over $2.2 billion in profits for his businesses and more than $600 million personally. Perkins is the author of Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life, and the conversation walks through its core framework: money is only a tool, life is a limited supply of health and time, and the goal is to maximize lifetime fulfillment rather than net worth. He explains memory dividends, time buckets, why "life is like Tetris," when to give money to your children and to charity, and how he broke out of a scarcity mindset.

The tone is upbeat, candid and funny, with Perkins mixing practical mental models with personal stories about wakeboarding at his 50th birthday, gifting his grandmother $10,000, and losing millions on failed projects. The conversation moves from philosophy about money to concrete life planning, then to mindset, adversity and advice on earning more.

The Discussion Explores:

• Money as a tool, and the three variables of wealth, health and time
• Memory dividends: why experiences keep paying off long after they happen
• Time buckets and why life is like Tetris
• The biggest psychological money mistake: fearing running out of money instead of wasting your life
• Why to give money to kids and charity while you're alive, and at the right age
• Breaking generational scarcity and the power of a "delusional" belief in yourself
• Three keys to earning more: belief, protecting your mindset and consistency
• Perkins's three final truths and his definition of greatness

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Money Is the Tool, Not the Goal

Perkins traces his thinking back to his early days in Manhattan as a low-paid screen clerk, surrounded by rich people he considered old, wondering what they would even do with their money. Books like Your Money or Your Life convinced him that the life, not the money, was the goal. He compares money to hammers and saws: the point of a hardware store isn't the tools but the house you build with them, and likewise "money is the tool to build your life," whether the experiences are adventurous, hedonistic or charitable. He wanted a life with scars, mistakes and risks, which unlocked his fearlessness about pursuing money as a tool.

He admits that for years he built the life that was advertised to him, like wanting his life to look like a rap video, only to find it wasn't fulfilling. His framework now rests on three variables: wealth, health and time. You live in what he calls an organic spacesuit with finite time, a body that will decay, and money, and the task is to allocate those resources across your life to get the most fulfillment. There's no single formula, he says, but there are mental models.

Memory Dividends and Time Buckets

Time matters not just as time until death but as seasons of life, because some experiences crowd out others. His deliberately crass example: dancing at clubs with glowsticks probably belongs before marriage and kids. He also notes that his body limits what he can enjoy. He once walked three or four miles to class in Paris and all over the city, but today, at 54, eight or nine miles leaves his knees hurting, so physically demanding trips belong now, not at 70 or 80. People on autopilot imagine retirement will look like a cruise commercial with perfect health, but health at 60 is very different from health at 40.

That's why he invests in experiences that create what he calls memory dividends: you enjoy an experience once when it happens and again every time you remember or retell it, much like a stock paying dividends. He encourages people in their 20s and 30s to ask what belongs in each bucket and to think about "gifting the memory dividends to my future self," while also avoiding choices that rob their future self of stability. He admits he's erred both ways: saving so much in his 20s that he was "borrowing from my poor self" to give to a richer future self, then later spending every nickel. The key is to get off autopilot. Financial planners, he warns, tend to maximize money, but the real goal is maximizing fulfillment.

The Biggest Psychological Crime: Wasting Your Life

Asked about the biggest psychological money mistake, Perkins says "the biggest psychological crime is people fear of running out of money instead of fear of wasting their life." People fear embarrassment, judgment and future failure rather than worrying that they're squandering each unique period of life, whether that's their 20s, their years with young children, or life after the kids move out.

His central metaphor: imagine that before coming to Earth, God lets you fill a bucket with every experience you want. "You can have all those. You just have to get the order right." So "life is like Tetris": if experiences aren't placed at the right time, they interfere with each other or your ability to do them disappears. He recalls visiting a church in St. Petersburg, Russia, where visitors could climb about 115 steps to walk around a balcony. Several tour buses of seniors came, and not one climbed. Their trip was entirely different from his, and perhaps should have been taken earlier. Your brain reaches maturity around 28 and your body around 33, he says, and after that your ability to convert money into meaningful experiences declines.

He illustrates with his 50th birthday in the Caribbean, when his lazy side wanted to skip wakeboarding. He asked himself when he'd next have the chance, realized his back and cartilage might not allow it later, went, landed a jump, and says that was the last time he'll ever wakeboard. He's switched to slower wake surfing, but he has the memory dividend for life, and every activity eventually has a last time.

Give to Kids and Charity While It Matters

The number one question Perkins hears is "what about the kids?" His answer: the same biology that limits your ability to enjoy money limits your kids' too. Leaving money when you die, when your children might be 60 or 65 with two-thirds of their lives behind them, is far less impactful than giving a smaller amount earlier. He doesn't tell people whether to give their kids money, only when: he suggests somewhere between 25 and 33, depending on maturity. He also warns that working extra hours to leave more money can diminish your legacy, because what kids want most is time and memories with you. He calls waiting until death to transfer assets one of the most "autopilot" things people do.

For his own two daughters, 16 and 19, he's set aside a fixed gift in a trust, separate from his own money so it's protected if he takes risks, with trustees able to help with things like health or grad school, and the rest unlocking to them around age 30. He says he doesn't want to control anyone from the grave: once children are adults, a parent is on the "advisory committee," and a gift should be a real gift, even if they light it on fire. Charity, he argues, works the same way: people are suffering now, and waiting until death to give, as he illustrates with a hypothetical donor to polio research, means more people are harmed in the meantime. The returns on educating a person now exceed any market return.

Spend Down to Zero and Know Your Survival Number

The book's axiom is to spend your money as close to zero as you can before you die. His reasoning: if you spend your life energy digging ditches for tokens and then die holding them, you've worked for no reward. Many people are like someone who buys tools, stores them in the garage and never uses them. Young people may need to save some, but many of life's best experiences, like hiking with friends, house parties, backpacking and camping, are cheap or free.

He separates spending into survival, which includes rent, food and an emergency cushion, and everything else, which are choices about life's adventures. He likes to attach savings to specific goals, like a trip, a house or taking your parents to dinner, rather than abstract tokens. He notes data showing that, even adjusting for healthcare, people spend less as they age, partly because they lose the ability and energy. His mother had to be practically kidnapped for a birthday trip to Scotland, though she loved it. And when he gave his grandmother $10,000 for her birthday, expecting her to take friends to Vegas, she simply bought him a sweater, teaching him that money becomes almost useless late in life. What older people really want, he says, is shared experiences and time with family, which money can't buy but can enhance, for example by paying for a relative's travel.

Breaking Scarcity: Delusion, Adversity and Losing the Ego

When he was earning about $16,000 a year as a screen clerk and driving a limo at night, his waiter roommate made about $77,000, and Perkins realized that if he lost his ego he could always find a job. A boss who used to drive a garbage truck reinforced that safety net. That freed him to take risks and go anywhere for opportunity, including leaving New York for Texas with just a mattress in an empty room. He says "one of my advantages was that I was delusional": he believed he could succeed, which drove him to learn and try, even though belief alone doesn't guarantee success.

He credits his father, who grew up before civil rights and had his dreams crushed, and his own childhood as a Black kid in Jersey City, born in 1969. Being told you were inferior taught him to brush off what others think and trust what he knew to be true about himself, a "superpower forged in adversity." He believes the victim story is marketed to people, and hopes those told they're inferior can flip it into a badge of honor with nothing to lose. He calls himself lucky to have two college-educated parents and to be born in a growing American economy, and says his willingness to look like a fool has been his greatest gift. He mentions a solar development project in the Nevada desert that he and friends built and sold to Capital Dynamics.

Three Keys to Earning More

Perkins's first key is belief that you can and are entitled to succeed, which leads you to read, try, strike out and swing again. He told someone on Twitter who had gone bankrupt that it's great they can now take another swing, and cites Steve Jobs being fired and rehired. The second is protecting your mindset: don't share your dreams with parents who remember your teenage years, and be wary of peers who act from fear. "Your success exposes their cowardice," he says, which is why "people like success, but they love a failure." He's been fired and gone broke twice, and lost $10 million on a failed project in Central America plus another in California, and says those experiences taught him who his real friends were.

The third key is consistency and taking your dreams seriously. Citing Paul Graham's point that ideas are worthless without execution, he notes people often take video games more seriously than their own dreams, and some deliberately don't try their best so they have an excuse if they fail. "Use all your resources like as if your life depends on it," he says, because these are the hours of your life, so it does.

Three Truths and Greatness

Asked to leave three final lessons, Perkins offers: "No matter what the question, love is the answer"; "Always do your best," drawn from The Four Agreements, his number one recommended book, noting that every regret he has traces back to not doing his best; and "Life is movement, because the more you move and the more information you process, the more life and fulfillment you have. He sums up his book as a fulfillment maximizer: It's net fulfillment over net worth." He defines greatness as "a life lived in integrity with yourself with your values," pointing to Nelson Mandela's capacity for forgiveness after decades in prison.

Conclusion

Bill Perkins reframes money from a scoreboard into a tool for building a fulfilling life, and makes the case that timing matters as much as amount. Because health and time decline, experiences, gifts to children and charitable giving are worth most when done at the right moment, and hoarding money until death wastes the life energy spent earning it. His memory dividends and Tetris metaphors make the idea stick, while his stories of losses, adversity and belief show how he learned to take risks. For anyone who saves diligently but wonders what it's all for, this conversation is a practical and motivating nudge to get off autopilot.

This is a summary of "You Don't Retire on Money. You Retire on Memories | Bill Perkins" from The School of Greatness, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.