📚The Book in 3 Bullets

• We should be focusing on maximizing our life enjoyment rather than on maximizing wealth.

• Things can buy you temporary happiness but then have a steep depreciation. Experiences, on the other hand, payout memory dividends that appreciate over time.

• At the end of your life, you will look back on the experiences you’ve had to gauge how fulfilling your life has been. So, start investing in experiences early if you want to get the most out of your life.

👤Who Should Read It?

• Anyone who wants to shift their mindset from making the most money to getting the most out of their money. This book tears down the notion that we should always save as much money as possible until the day we die, and instead look at ways to spend money on experiences we’ll remember for a lifetime.

🌎 How the Book Changed Me

• For the majority of my life, I have embraced the identity of a frugal person. To the extent that I have missed out on experiences, that looking back on now, I should’ve taken. This book has opened my eyes to the fact that I can always make more money, but I can’t make more time. Now that I’m in my mid-twenties, I need to take advantage of my health and free time to try new experiences, and visit different places, even if it means I won’t have much money to put into a savings or retirement account yet.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• What good is wealth without health?

• If we didn’t have to work to earn money, most of us would find other things we’d much rather do with our time.

• Your life is the sum of your experiences.

• The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end that’s all there is.

• Buying an experience doesn’t just buy you the experience itself—it also buys you the sum of all the dividends that experience will bring for the rest of your life.

• A person’s ability to extract real enjoyment out of the gift of an inheritance declines with their age.

• No one ever regrets not having spent more time in the office.

• The younger you are, the bolder you should be.

• People are more afraid of running out of money than wasting their life, and that’s got to switch.

• The business of life is the acquisition of memories.

📖 Summary & Notes

Rule number 1: Maximize your positive experiences.

• When the end is near, we start thinking, “What the hell am I doing, and why did I wait so long?”

• Don’t delay gratification for too long, it might be too late, saving money for experiences you’ll never enjoy.

• Sooner or later we all die, so the question we all must answer is how to make the most of our finite time on earth.

• What’s the best way to allocate our life energy before we die?

• You always have the potential to make more money in the future, but you can never recapture time that is gone. So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass by us for fear of squandering our money.

• You need to decide what makes you happy and convert your money into experiences that you will enjoy.

• To increase your overall lifetime fulfillment, it’s important to have each experience at the right age.

• Your earning potential tends to increase with age. Don’t kill yourself by working extra hours to save a bit of money when you can earn more in the future.

• Your money represents life energy—this is all the hours that you’re alive to do things.

• Before you purchase something, ask yourself, “How many hours of work will this cost me?” This will help you be more deliberate with your spending.

• Spending money on experiences makes people happier than spending money on things.

• Experiences gain value over time: They pay memory dividends. Times when you look back and experience a rush of emotions that come back when you think of that time.

• When your goal is to maximize fulfillment across your lifespan, it’s not at all obvious how much of your life energy should be applied to earning money and how much to have experiences.

• Start thinking about the life experiences you’d like to have, and the number of times you’d like to have them.

Rule number 2: Start investing in experiences early.

• At the end of your life, you will judge the richness of it by the experiences you’ve had throughout it.

• You retire on your memories. When you’re frail and can’t do much, you can look back on the life you’ve lived and the experiences you’ve had.

• When you spend time or money on experiences, you get more than just an enjoyable moment. You also get the ongoing memory dividend from those experiences.

• By having experiences, you not only live a more engaged and interesting life yourself, but you also have more of yourself to share with others.

• We acquire money with the goal of having experiences.

• You definitely need money to survive retirement, but the main thing you’ll be retiring on will be your memories—so make sure you invest enough in those.

• When you think about investing in memory dividends, you realize the earlier you start investing, the more time you have to reap your memory dividends.

• When you’re young and cash poor, you should explore all the free or nearly free experiences you can have.

• Start investing in experiences now! If you’re resisting a certain experience, consider the risk of not having it now.

Rule number 3: Aim to die with zero.

• If you don’t want to squander your life energy, you should aim to spend all your money before you die.

• If you die with money in the bank, you essentially worked for free!

• You can leave money to the people and causes that are important to you—but wouldn’t they be better off getting your money sooner rather than later? Why wait until you die?

• Most people who save tend to save too much for too late in their lives.

• Americans’ median net worth keeps rising at least until their mid-seventies.

  • This is because people’s annual incomes tend to rise with age, and people continue to save what they don’t spend.

• Most people take delayed gratification too far.

• The common misconception is that people spend more money as they get older and health costs continue to rise. But the opposite tends to happen. As people get older, their spending declines, because most other expenses, such as clothing and entertainment are much lower.

• Healthcare can become insanely costly, but no amount of savings available to most people will cover the costliest healthcare you might possibly need.

• You can’t pay your way out of high-priced end-of-life medical care; since uninsured medical care is so expensive, it won’t make any difference for the vast majority of us whether we save for it or not. Either the government will pay for it or you will die.

• There’s a big difference between living and just being kept alive. So working a few extra years to save a few more months on a ventilator with a quality of life near zero is not worth it.

• We all die sooner or later, it’s better to die when the time is right than sacrifice your better years just to squeeze out a few more days at the end.

• It’s much wiser to spend your money on healthcare on the front end to prevent disease than on the back end after the disease is advanced.

• Long-term care insurance can cover you without having to save up exorbitant amounts of money on potential healthcare costs.

Rule number 4: Use all available tools to help you die with zero.

• Use a life expectancy calculator so you can get an idea of when you might die. Without this, you won’t be able to make optimal decisions about how to optimally live for fulfillment.

• Look into buying an annuity. This can help cover your costs if you outlive your expected death date. Annuities help protect you against dying too old (outliving your savings).

  • You buy an annuity by giving an insurance company a lump sum—say, $500,000 at age 60—and in return, you get a guaranteed monthly payout for the rest of your life, however long that happens to be.

• As you age, your health declines and interests diminish, which means that your spending rate won’t remain constant. If you want to die with zero and make the most of the health you have at every point in your lifetime, you will need to spend more in your fifties than in your sixties, and more in your sixties than in your seventies.

• Don’t give up years working for money when you’re young and healthy for extra weeks when you’re old and immobile.

• The reminder of death gives a much-needed urgency to one’s life.

• Start thinking more about how you use your limited time and your life energy, and you’ll be well on your way to living the fullest life you possibly can.

Rule number 5: Give money to your children or to charity when it has the most impact.

• The probability of receiving an inheritance is highest at around age 60.

• Think deliberately about how much money you want to give your kids, then give it to them before you die.

• Getting less money earlier in life has a greater impact than getting a larger inheritance later in life.

• If you get the money when you’re 30, you can buy a nice house and raise your kids in the environment you want to raise them in, and not have to scramble.

• Between the ages of 26 and 35 is when money can have the greatest impact on a person’s life.

• You always get more value out of money before your health begins to inevitably decline. The age range of 26-35 is when you’re old enough to be trusted with the money, and young enough to fully enjoy its benefits.

• If you’re trying to maximize the impact of the money you give—instead of just maximizing the absolute dollar amount you give—you should aim to give the money as close to their peak as you can.

• Having experiences with your kids is how they will remember you.

Rule number 6: Don’t live your life on autopilot.

• Many economists argue now that young people should be freer with their money, even though it runs counter to the advice most of us grow up hearing.

• Your salary and earning power typically rise as does your age.

• When you’re young, you shouldn’t be saving, you should be borrowing. You should be living today in much the way you’ll be living in 10 to 15 years, and it’s crazy to actually be scrimping and saving. Even though most of us are taught we need to start saving as much as possible as early as possible.

• You should be taking risks when you’re young enough to recover from the possible downside—but only if there’s an upside that the reward makes up for the risk to pay off.

• If you want to take a trip when you don’t have kids or other responsibilities, you should take it now. It’d even be okay to go into debt for the once-in-a-lifetime experience.

• Strike the right balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.

• Some financial experts urge you to save at least 10 percent of your income each month or each paycheck. But this does not account for how much money you are currently making or how much you’ll be making in the future.

• The typical budget prescribed is to spend 50 percent on must-haves, 30 percent on your personal wants, and the remaining 20 percent on building your savings or paying down your debt.

• If you want to maximize your lifetime fulfillment without going broke—then you’ll need a more sophisticated way of thinking about balance.

• Your savings percentage should NOT be the same when you’re 22 versus when you’re 52. The optimal balance between spending and saving varies from person to person and will shift as your age and income change.

• It’s crazy to save 20 percent of your income when you’re young and have good reason to expect to earn much more in the next few years. It can even make sense to borrow money when you expect to earn a lot more down the road.

• When you will die should affect how you spend your time.

• Travel is a good gauge of a person’s ability to extract enjoyment from money because it takes time, money, and health. Many 80-year-olds can’t travel as much or as far because their health prevents it.

• The less healthy you are, the less you’re able to cope with long flights, airport layovers, irregular sleep, and other travel-related stressors.

• People under age 60 are most constrained by time and money, whereas people 75 and older are most constrained by health problems.

• 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.

• Starting in your twenties, your health very subtly starts to decline, causing a corresponding decline in your ability to enjoy money. 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.

• Instead of saving 20 percent of their income throughout their working years, some people would be better off saving almost nothing in their early twenties, then gradually ramping up their saving rate during their late twenties and thirties as their income begins to rise.

• Health, free time, and money are the three basics people need to have to get the most out of life.

• Young people should prize their free time more than most do.

• How quickly you get tired on a day of sightseeing, snowboarding, or playing with little kids has an obvious impact on how much enjoyment you get out of that day.

• You can spend money to buy free time. For example, you can have your laundry done by someone else, have your groceries delivered to you, and have your house cleaned by someone else. By outsourcing these tasks, you create new free time that would’ve been spent on these chores.

• By paying someone to do tasks you don’t enjoy, you are simultaneously reducing the number of negative life experiences and increasing the number of positive life experiences.

• Should you wait nine or ten years to get two of the experiences you could have today?

• The older you get, the less willing you should be to delay inexperience, even if someone pays you a lot of money to do so.

• Think about your current physical health: What life experiences can you have now that you might not be able to have later?

• If your ability to enjoy experiences is more constrained by time than by money or health, think of one or two ways you can spend some money now to free up more of your time.

Rule number 7: Think of your life as distinct seasons.

• Realize that nothing lasts forever. Everything eventually fades and dies. This can help you appreciate everything more in the here and now. There will be a last time for everything you do in your life!

• The top regret among most people on their death is wishing they hadn’t worked so hard.

• Being aware that your time is limited can clearly motivate you to make the most of the time you do have.

• Most people just have the sense that there’s no time urgency near home; they act as if they will always be able to visit that museum or that nearby beach or that friend some other time. As a result, we spend many of our evenings watching TV, and we fritter away our weekends. In short, when something feels abundant and endless, the truth is, we don’t always value it.

• Time-bucket your life. Set certain experiences for different times in your life. You need to realize that some experiences are better done at certain ages.

• Without the constraint of money, most of your experiences would optimally occur in your twenties and thirties, when your health is highest. But in reality, most people’s spending is clustered around midlife instead.

Rule number 8: Know when to stop growing your wealth.

• The people you share experiences with truly affect the quality of the experience.

• If you work your nose to the grindstone too much every day, you run the risk of waking up one morning and realizing that you may have delayed too much. And at the extreme, indefinitely delayed gratification means no gratification.

• The peak is not a specific dollar amount but a specific date tied to your biological age.

• A number should not be most people’s main goal because, psychologically, no number will ever feel like enough.

• Continuing to build wealth doesn’t necessarily buy you more experiences, because your declining health limits your enjoyment of certain experiences no matter how much money you have.

• For most people, accumulating more money takes time. So by working more years to build up more savings than you actually need, you are getting more money, but you are losing even more free time or health which could be considered more important than the money.

• The most common retirement age in the United States is 62, the age at which people can start collecting Social Security benefits.

• For most people, the optimal net worth peak occurs at some point between the ages of 45 and 60.

• Don’t slave away at a job and never get the gold.

• Your spending in old age is lower than in the middle years because older people usually don’t have the health needed to spend as much on experiences. As a result, unless you spend significantly more in your middle years than most people do, you will fail to die with zero.

• While you’re still working to earn money, you’d better save for that time in your life when you’ll no longer be working. Just realize that time moves in only one direction and that as it passes it sweeps away opportunities for certain experiences forever. If you keep that in mind as you plan your future, you’ll be more likely to make the best use of every year of time in your life.

• As you go through life, your interests change and new people enter your life, so it’s a good idea to repeat the time-bucketing exercise once in a while, such as every five or ten years.

Rule number 9: Take your biggest risks when you have little to lose.

• The upside of taking a chance always includes emotional benefits—even if things don’t work out. There’s a great sense of pride at having pursued an important goal wholeheartedly.

• When you’re young you can afford to take a lot of risks because you have plenty of time to recover—you can stumble and stumble your ass off and come back just fine.

• Don’t be afraid to seek new life adventures and move because you are fearful of moving away from a few people. When deciding if you should move, quantify every single fear you have.

• Don’t underestimate the risk of inaction. Staying the course instead of making bold moves feels safe, but consider what you stand to lose: the life you could have lived if you had mustered the courage to be bolder. You’re gaining a certain kind of security, but you are also losing experience points.

• If you’re prone to knee-jerk fear reactions to taking bold moves, think through the worst-case scenario.

• Look at the fears holding you back, rational or irrational. Don’t let irrational fears get in the way of your dreams.

• Realize that at every moment you have a choice. The choices you make reflect your priorities, so be sure you’re making those choices deliberately.