The first six parts of this series were, one way or another, about getting money — wanting it, growing it, understanding what it is, the mindset behind it, the choice to own rather than only earn, and the daily habits that make any of it stick. This part is about the opposite question, the one almost nobody asks: what is the money actually for, and what does it cost you to keep holding on to it? The book that made me ask was Bill Perkins's Die With Zero.
I should be honest about who is reading it. I am a saver, by habit and by training. Twenty years of helping run a business teaches you to always keep something back for the lean month that always, in the end, comes. So a book whose main message is, more or less, spend it — spend it while you still can — unsettled me from the first page. I did not agree with all of it, and I am not sure I have fully done any of it. But four of its ideas have stayed with me, and this is my honest account of them.
OneThe Memory Dividend
This is the idea the whole book is built on, and the one that moved something in me. Perkins says an experience does not end when it ends. You keep drawing on it for the rest of your life — every time you remember it, tell it, or feel it come back to you on an ordinary afternoon. He calls this the memory dividend.
An experience is the one thing you can buy that keeps paying you back, in memory, long after the money is gone.
Once you see spending this way, the saver's careful math starts to look incomplete. We always ask what a rupee will become if we save it. We rarely ask what it will give back if we spend it on the right thing. A trip taken at thirty is still paying its owner at sixty — not in money, but in the only currency that ends up mattering.
I did not have to look far for proof. The long rides south I have written about here, the one trip I take each year on my own, the trip I take once a year with my old gang of friends, the holidays with my family — all of it makes me feel alive in a way almost nothing else does. By now those days have paid me back many times over what they ever cost. They were, it turns out, the cheapest thing I have ever bought.
TwoMoney Has a Use-By Date
Here is the idea I argue with most, and lose to most. Perkins points out something simple that I had somehow never sat with: a rupee is not worth the same thing at every age. At thirty, a rupee can buy a kind of living — a hard ride, a long sleepless drive, a journey with more discomfort in it than sense — that the very same rupee simply cannot buy at seventy-five, however large the savings have grown by then. The money survives. The body that would have spent it does not, not in the same way.
This is what the plain title really means. Die with zero is not advice to die broke, and it is not an excuse to be careless. It is a warning about one quiet kind of loss: reaching the comfortable number you saved toward your whole life, and finding you can no longer turn much of it into the living you were saving it for.
I think I understood a part of this before I ever read the book. A few years ago I bought a motorcycle, and two years after that, another one. Both times the careful voice in my head said the same thing: wait, you don't need it yet, keep the money for later. And both times a louder, truer voice answered with something I could not argue with — that if I kept putting it off, my age and my body might not let me ride the way I wanted to by the time later finally came. So I bought them, and I rode them, and I have never once regretted it. The money I would have kept would still be sitting there today. The roads I rode would not have waited.
ThreeSome Things Have a Season
Perkins gives a simple tool for this. He suggests dividing the years ahead into buckets and asking, honestly, what each season of life is actually for. Not a bucket list — a bucket calendar. Because the mistake most of us make is to assume the whole menu will still be on the table later, when we are finally ready. Much of it will not be. Much of it quietly closes on a schedule we never check.
Some things belong only to one age and cannot be saved for another. A certain kind of trip with old friends, taken while everyone's knees still work. Carrying a small child on your shoulders, which is open to you for a few short years and then shut for good. The seasons do not wait for you to feel ready. They open, and they close.
This is the same math I tried to make plain in the little calculator elsewhere on this site — the one that turns the time you have left with the people you love into an uncomfortably small number. Perkins, I realised, is simply the reason behind that math. If the number really is that small, then saving the experiences up for a later that may never come is not being careful. It is a quiet kind of waste.
FourGive With a Warm Hand
The last of the four is the one I read more than once. Perkins says most inheritance arrives too late to do its best work — handed over when the person receiving it is already in their sixties, long past the years when it could have changed the shape of a life. The money comes, but it comes after the season it was most needed has closed.
His answer is to give earlier, and on purpose — while you are still here to watch it do its work, and while the person receiving it is at the age where it actually changes something. The same goes for giving to the wider world: money usually does more good now, working, than as a number released at the very end.
Help given while you can still watch it work is worth more than the same help read out after you are gone.
I will not say much more about this one. I will only say that the people you most want to help are rarely helped best by a number they are handed once you are no longer there to see it land. That sentence has been sitting quietly with me for weeks.
What an Uncle Taught Me
Some years ago, my wife and I drove to Bangalore to spend a day with her uncle and aunt. The uncle — Mr. C.K. Kuriakose, Managing Director of Chery Tech (India) Private Limited — was also my dad's old college friend, so it was a warm house to be in. We had planned to head back to Cochin the next morning, and he asked why we were leaving so soon. I gave the answer I always gave: the boys were with my parents, and we needed to get back to them.
He said something then that I have carried ever since. Gently, he told me that we should make sure to live a little for ourselves too — not only for the children. The children grow up, he said, but the time you do not spend on yourself never comes back. It is alright, once in a while, to take that time for yourself.
I had spent my whole life until then putting my family first and keeping the rest saved for later. His words stayed with me. Slowly I came to think he was right — that loving the people you are responsible for and being kind to yourself are not opposites, and that a little time lived for its own sake is not a selfish thing. That is really why I began doing the things that make me feel alive. And whenever I hesitate, I ask myself the only question that ever settles it: if not now, then when?
I told all of this once to a friend, Sony, on a family trip — a while after I had finally bought a new bike I had promised myself for years. He asked me about the purchase, half-curious about what had finally made me do it. So I told him the story of the uncle in Bangalore, and what it had done to the way I think. Some time later, Sony went and bought the car he himself had been quietly dreaming of — which I only came to know after he had already bought it. The same few words that an uncle once handed to me had, somehow, travelled on to him. That is the memory dividend doing something the book does not quite mention: sometimes the dividend is not paid to you at all, but to the next person down the line. Like I said — an experience is the one thing you can buy that keeps paying you back, in memory, long after the money is gone.
Where I Am With All This
Let me be honest, since I promised honesty rather than a sales pitch for the book.
I have not become a spender. The saving habit is too old and too deep, and a good part of it is good sense rather than fear — a business does not last twenty years on people who spend down to nothing by instinct. I still keep something back for the lean month. I expect I always will.
But the book moved a dial I did not know could move. I have started to ask of the savings not only the saver's question — is it still growing? — but a second one I had never thought to ask: what is it for, and when, exactly, do I plan to use it? A number with no answer to that second question is not really wealth. It is just a high score.
The trips on this site, I now see, were already memory dividends — bought almost by accident, still paying. What Die With Zero taught me is to buy a few more of them on purpose, while the roads are still drivable and the people I would drive them with are still here to come along.
The saver lives with one quiet fear: running out. Perkins handed me a second one I had genuinely never thought about — reaching the end with the money untouched and a stack of unlived years sitting beside it. Both fears are real. The work, for the rest of the way, is to keep one honest eye on each.
The first six books in this series taught me how to build the savings. This one, at last, reminded me what I was building them for.
