🔍 The Book in 3 Sentences
- Hoarding away money until you die robs you of life’s experience.
- Giving away your money late in life delays the impact it can have on the beneficiaries.
- There should be a balance between spending money on things that will improve your life experience and preparing for retirement because the older you get the less you are able to enjoy many experiences.
💭 Impressions
While I enjoyed the concept of the book and had some takeaways, this is one of those reads that could have been a long blog post instead of an entire book.
I simultaneously agree with and struggle with some of the recommendations in the book.
Why I choose this book
I decided to read this one because it was being recommended by a lot of people that I follow on social media and I’m very focused on life design at the moment.
👨🎓 What the book taught me
💡 How my life / behavior / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.
- I will be more willing to spend money on high quality experiences before I am too old to be able to enjoy those experiences.
🎙️ My Top Quotes
- The key takeaway, I now realize, is to strike the right balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.
- A person’s ability to extract enjoyment from their money begins to decline with age.
📒 Summary + Notes
These notes came directly from the book. Meaning, they are not my interpretations. I simply highlighted passages I found interesting and exported them below.
The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end that’s all there is.
60 percent of Americans own at least some life insurance.
Note: Do they own life insurance directly or does this factor in insurance provided through work?
You relinquish your principal forever.
Note: This is only true for those that annuitize. You can build them with death benefits.
Economists generally think that annuities are such a rational way to deal with longevity risk that many experts have long wondered why more people don’t buy annuities - a question economists call the annuity puzzle.
If you’re nervous about someday running out of money before you die, then spend some time looking to annuities as a possible solution.
Much more likely, the money will arrive too late for it to have maximum impact on the recipient’s quality of life.
When it comes to giving money to your kids, the optimal time, as I suggested earlier in the chapter, is when they’re between 26 and 35
the key takeaway, I now realize, is to strike the right balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.
A person’s ability to extract enjoyment from their money begins to decline with age.
In other words, when time and money are no longer a problem, health is.
seven days straight is too much for him now. This diminished enjoyment from declining health also has a real impact on how far your dollar goes,
Many of us have this mental disconnect with reality, and the disconnect helps perpetuate the myth of endless go-go years in retirement, as if we’ll always be able to do what we enjoy doing.
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’d better spend the money when you still have the health.
Here’s the point: Too many of us still view ourselves on an ongoing basis as being in our twenties, even though our real age is somewhere in our fifties, sixties, or even seventies.
If your capacity to enjoy life experiences is higher at some ages than others, then it makes sense to spend more of your money at certain ages than others!
Think about the three basics people need to have to get the most out of life: health, free time, and money. The problem is that these things rarely all come together at once.
Most working people focus too much on getting more money. Let me explain why focusing on health and free time will yield more personal fulfillment.
In fact, health is actually a lot more valuable than money, because no amount of money can ever make up for very poor health, whereas people in good health but with little money can still have many wonderful experiences.
What I’m really trying to get across is that improved health improves everything in your life, makes every experience more enjoyable, at every age.
The other big opportunity I see for creating a more balanced life is to exchange money for free time, a tactic that usually has the most impact in one’s middle years, when you have more money than time.
This isn’t just my personal experience or economic theorizing. Research in psychology backs me up: People who spend money on time-saving purchases experience greater life satisfaction, regardless of their income.
If you pay to get out of doing tasks you don’t enjoy, you are simultaneously reducing the number of negative life experiences and increasing the number of positive life experiences (for which you now have more time).
the older you are, the more someone should have to pay you to delay an experience.
Because of this eventual finality of 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.
this ability to transfer physical experiences from one time period to another is limited. In fact, it’s actually more limited than most people seem to realize when they delay and delay.
The problem of confronting overly delayed gratification and the resulting regret doesn’t occur just once, at the end of one’s life. Rather, it can occur at every period during your life,
Her patients number one regret was wishing they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves, as opposed to the life that others expected of them.
the second regret, and actually the top regret among male patients, was this: I wish I had not worked so hard.
Being aware that your time is limited can clearly motivate you to make the most of the time you do have.
you have children, think about your own version of the Heffalump movie: What one experience do you want to have more of with them in the next year or two, before that phase of their life and your life is over?
Invest in experiences that yield long-lasting memories, always bear in mind that everyone’s health declines with age, give your money to your children before you die instead of saving for their inheritance, and learn to balance current enjoyment with later gratification.
Throughout your life you have to balance your spending on the present with your saving for the future. The optimal balance shifts from year to year because your health and income are likely to change each year.
The older you get, the more you have to lose. But it’s not just that the stakes are higher. The potential rewards are also lower!
whatever level of risk you’re comfortable with, whatever bold moves you might contemplate for your life, you’re generally better off making those moves earlier in your life.
there’s a difference between low risk tolerance and plain old fear.
By aiming to die with zero, you will forever change your autopilot focus from earning and saving and maximizing your wealth to living the best life you possibly can.
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