Bill Perkins Quotes

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.

What Good Is Wealth Without Health?

we all have at least the potential to make more money in the future, we can never go back and recapture time that is now gone. So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.

Your biggest fear ought to be wasting your life and time, not "Am I going to have x number of dollars when I'm 80?

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

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

Nothing has a greater effect on your ability to enjoy experiences—at any age—than your health.

what’s easy shouldn’t determine what you do. Don’t let difficulty dissuade you from living your best life!

No, 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.

Research in psychology backs me up: People who spend money on time-saving purchases experience greater life satisfaction, regardless of their income.

In other words, to get the most out of your time and money, timing matters. So to increase your overall lifetime fulfillment, it’s important to have each experience at the right age.

To fully enjoy life instead of just surviving it, you need to stop driving mindlessly and actively steer your life the way you want it to go.

the senselessness of indefinitely delayed gratification.

Although we all have at least the potential to make more money in the future, we can never go back and recapture time that is now gone. So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.

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.

I hope my message has at least jarred you into rethinking the standard and conventional approaches to living one’s life—get a good job, work hard through endless hours, and then retire in your sixties or seventies and live out your days in your so-called golden years. But I still ask you: Why wait until your health and life energy have begun to wane? Rather than just focusing on saving up for a big pot full of money that you will most likely not be able to spend in your lifetime, live your life to the fullest now: Chase memorable life experiences, give money to your kids when they can best use it, donate money to charity while you’re still alive. That’s the way to live life. Remember: In the end, the business of life is the acquisition of memories. So what are you waiting for?

That is what I mean when I say that we die many deaths in the course of our lives: The teenager in you dies, the college student in you dies, the single unattached you dies, the version of you that’s a parent of an infant dies, and so on. Once each of these mini-deaths occurs, there’s no going back. Maybe “dies” is a bit harsh, but you get the idea: We all keep moving forward, progressing from one stage or phase of our lives to the next.

First of all, yes, you can certainly leave money to the people and causes you care about—but the truth is that those people and causes would be better off getting your wealth sooner rather than later. Why wait until after you die?

Nothing has a greater effect on your ability to enjoy experiences—at any age—than your health. 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.

When you face asymmetric risk, it makes total sense to be bold, to grab the opportunity at hand. At the extreme, when the downside is very low (or nonexistent, as in the “nothing to lose” case) and the upside is really high, it’s actually riskier not to make the bold move. The downside of not even taking a chance is emotional: potentially a lifetime of regret and wondering What if? 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. If you’ve given something your all, you’ll get a lot of positive memories out of the experience no matter what happens.

As humans, we have trouble processing large amounts of data involving multiple variables, and when we get overwhelmed we go on autopilot, and the result is far from optimal.

The utility of money changes over time, and it does so in a fairly predictable way: Starting sometime in your twenties, your health very subtly starts to decline, causing a corresponding decline in your ability to enjoy money. Ability to Enjoy Experiences Based on Health Everyone's health declines with age. Wealth, on the other hand, tends to grow over the years as people save up more and more. But worsening health gradually constrains your enjoyment of that wealth as more and more physical activities become impossible to enjoy, no matter how much money you can afford to spend on them.

At the high end, retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.8 percent of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. That’s more than 88 percent left over—which means that a person retiring at 65 with half a million dollars still has more than $440,000 left at age 85! At the lower end, retirees with less than $200,000 saved up for retirement spent a higher percentage (as you might expect, since they had less to spend overall)—but even this group’s median members had spent down only one-quarter of their assets 18 years after retirement.

Life is not a game of Space Invaders—you don’t get points for all the money you rack up in the game—but many people treat it as though it were. They just keep earning and earning, trying to maximize their wealth without giving nearly as much thought to maximizing what they get out of that wealth—including what they can give to their children, their friends, and the larger society now, instead of waiting until they die.

A Black statistician by the name of Bill Jenkins found out about the study and tried to ring the alarm. You know why nobody listened?” “Why?” I whispered. “Because even though regular folks didn’t know, the medical folks knew. In some respects, the government did this in plain sight. They were publishing articles in medical journals about it and everything. Either they didn’t see what was wrong with it, or nobody cared about poor colored folks down in Alabama.” “Or they thought they were doing good,” I said.

Or, if your out-of-pocket medical expenses amount to $50,000 per night (as they did for my father’s hospital stay at the end of his life), does it really matter whether you’ve saved $10,000 or $50,000 or even $250,000? No, it doesn’t, because the extra $50,000 will buy you one extra night, a night that might well have taken you a year’s worth of work to earn! Similarly, $250,000 saved over however many years will get wiped out in five days. I’m not suggesting that you should rack up large hospital costs with a plan to then stiff the hospital on those bills. What I’m saying is that 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 real 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.

The insurance companies that create annuities often make them seem like investments,” he wrote in a recent explainer about annuities. “But really they’re more like insurance.” Lieber went on: “Like insurance to stave off financial disaster, an annuity is something you purchase to guarantee that you won’t run out of money if you live a long time.” In fact, thinking of annuities as insurance makes them a lot more sensible than thinking of them as investments—because as investments they are not good at all. But that’s not their goal—their goal is to insure you against the risk of outliving your money.

You might think that as people get older, they spend money more freely out of the sheer desire to make the most of it before it’s truly too late. But the opposite tends to happen. In general, spending among American households declines as people age. For example, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that in 2017, average annual spending for households headed by 55-to-64-year-olds was $65,000; average spending fell to $55,000 for those between 65 and 74; and spending fell again to $42,000 for those 75 and older. This overall decline occurred despite a rise in healthcare expenses, because most other expenses, such as clothing and entertainment, were much lower. The decline in spending over time was even more acute for retirees with more than $1 million in assets, according to separate research conducted by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which analyzed data from more than half a million of its customers.

think about what you really want out of this life in terms of meaningful and memorable experiences.

earning and earning while forgetting that your whole point in earning money is to be able to spend it on the experiences that make your life what it is.

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.

As you might recall, I was a penny-pinching guy in my twenties, proud of myself for managing to save up money

alcanzar el equilibrio adecuado entre gastar en el presente (y sólo en lo que valoras) y en ahorrar inteligentemente para el futuro.

Experts in retirement planning even have some lingo for this consumption pattern: go-go years, slow-go years, and no-go years.

Death wakes people up, and the closer it gets, the more awake and aware we become.

The Christian life isn’t about being perfect and deserving God’s favor. It’s about taking a few steps, stumbling, getting back up, and taking a few more steps.

Frank Hummert was a Chicago copywriter in the ’20s. In 1930 he met Anne Ashenhurst, a former newspaperwoman who became his assistant and, five years later, his wife. The Hummerts had a formula that was surefire: appeal to the lowest common denominator, make it clear, grab the heartstrings, and reap the rewards. With writer Robert Hardy Andrews they created The Stolen Husband, one of radio’s earliest soaps. Hummert went on to do the most notable serials of the daytime. His name was added to the agency Blackett & Sample, though he was never a partner and owned no part of it. He left Blackett-Sample-Hummert and moved to New York. His new company, Air Features, Inc., turned out (among many others) Just Plain Bill, The Romance of Helen Trent, Ma Perkins, Our Gal Sunday, Lorenzo Jones, and Stella Dallas. It was estimated that Hummert at his peak bought 12.5 percent of the entire network radio schedule, that he billed $12 million a year, that his fiction factory produced almost seven million words a season.

The moment we trust in Jesus, God’s Spirit acts like an electric current touching the filament of our spirit, and we’re able to fulfill our God-given purpose.1 Unlike the unreliable power source on which a lightbulb depends, the Holy Spirit indwells us with an inexhaustible and unbreakable supply of energy—the same resource that Jesus drew

It’s as if, when we become Christians, God attaches a spiritual umbilical cord to our spirits so he can impart to us his life and strength. Unlike a physical birth, when the doctor cuts the cord, in our spiritual rebirth, God remains attached to us.2

So many people tell themselves that they are working for their kids — they just blindly assume that earning more money will benefit their kids. But until you stop to think about the numbers, you can’t know whether sacrificing your time to earn more money will result in a net benefit for your children.

Another principle: Although we all have at least the potential to make more money in the future, we can never go back and recapture time that is now gone. So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.

a plan to spend a huge portion of your wealth during the last few weeks of life makes no sense. It’s totally irrational.

la premisa de este libro es que deberías centrarte en maximizar el disfrute de tu vida en lugar de maximizar tu riqueza. Se trata de dos objetivos muy distintos. El dinero no es más que un medio para un fin. Tener dinero te ayuda a alcanzar el objetivo, más importante, de disfrutar de tu vida; pero intentar maximizar tu dinero se interpone, de hecho, en el camino de alcanzar el objetivo más importante. Por lo tanto, ten siempre presente este objetivo último. Haz que «maximizar el disfrute total de tu vida» sea tu mantra, usándolo para guiar cada decisión, incluyendo en qué centrarte con tu asesor financiero.

Al mismo tiempo, pensar en la muerte puede ser angustiante, por lo que tendemos a evitar hacerlo, y nos comportamos como si nunca fuese a suceder. Seguimos postergando experiencias maravillosas, como si en nuestro último mes de vida pudiésemos embutir todas esas experiencias aplazadas a lo largo de nuestra vida. No es necesario decir que eso no es posible, por lo que es completamente irracional.

Empieza a pensar más en cómo usar tu tiempo limitado y tu energía vital, y estarás en el buen camino para vivir la vida más plena posible.

What’s the takeaway here? Being aware that your time is limited can clearly motivate you to make the most of the time you do have.

As you time-bucket your life, you parcel out a single list of experiences into different and distinct time sections of your life.

or

The Real Golden Years We’ve all been told—like so many hardworking, diligent ants—that we need to save up our money for our “golden years” of retirement. But ironically, the real golden years—the period of maximum potential enjoyment because we have the most health and wealth—mostly come before the traditional retirement age of 65. And those real golden years are the years during which we should be doing most of our spending, not delaying gratification. Too many people are making the mistake of investing in their future well past the point when those investments will ever pay off in ways that increase their overall lifetime fulfillment. Why do they persist? I think a lot of it is just the inertia (or, as I call it, autopilot) of doing what’s worked in the past. Sometimes it’s better to spend now, and other times you’re better off saving up (and investing) your money for a potentially better experience in the future. At the extremes, this is easy to see: Obviously, if you keep hoarding your money and don’t spend any of it, your fulfillment curve will be minimal. And if you spend all your money now, you won’t have any for the future. It’s the Ant and the Grasshopper as I see the fable: There is a time to work (and save) and a time to play, and the optimal life requires planning for both survival and thriving. The grasshopper is so focused on thriving, on enjoying himself in the moment, that he forgets about survival and ends up living too short a life. But the ant is also making a big mistake: As a result of his hard work, he will live to see another year, but he is so preoccupied with survival that he doesn’t get to enjoy summer and thrive. Neither extreme optimizes for lifetime fulfillment. Understanding that moral is one thing, but putting it into practice is a different story. At any one point, it’s not easy to know which way to go. The optimal balance between saving and spending is not obvious at all. If you’ve spent decades dutifully saving and investing your money, it can be hard to stop—assuming you’re even aware that you should stop. So what do you do? How do you achieve more balance in your life? I suggest several ways of thinking about the problem. Depending on who you are and how you think, different ones will resonate with you. Balancing Health, Money, and Time Across Your Life

The “religious freedom” promoted by Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Religious Right of Ken Ham and Tony Perkins is a fraud and a scam; it is antithetical to true freedom of conscience and belief.

Just Plain Bill was one of the biggest (and first) successes of daytime radio, enjoying a run of more than two decades. It exploited a favored theme of producers Frank and Anne Hummert: life in a small town. The precise location of Hartville was not revealed, but it was always thought to be somewhere in the Midwest. The serial was unusual in at least two aspects: the protagonist was male, and the musical bridges were played on guitar and harmonica, giving it a sound quite unlike the organ-drenched serials around it. Bill Davidson was one of the first great philosophers of serial drama. He was the male counterpart of Ma Perkins, predating that staunch old mother of the air by almost a year. He ran a barbershop, but what Bill did best was meddle in the lives of his friends, all for their own good. He got involved under protest, arguing in that marvelously caring voice that “this is really none of my affair” while the announcer returned to put it in perspective: How can Bill, drawn into the middle of this romantic triangle, straighten out the lives of his friends?

But only a fool defines “right” ends achieved by “wrong” ways as success.

I’d rather die when the time is right than sacrifice my better years just to squeeze out a few more days at the tail end.

So your life is the sum of your experiences. But how do you maximize the value of your experiences in order to make the most out of your one life? Or, as I put it earlier in this chapter: What’s the best way to spend your life energy before you die?

And once it’s yours, it now represents hours of your life, which you can exchange for whatever will help you live the best life you can.

Besides, it is much smarter to spend your healthcare money on the front end (to maintain your health and try to prevent disease) than to spend it at the end, when you get a lot less bang for every buck you spend.

So how do you make sure you’re covered if you need long-term care, without having to save up massive amounts of money you won’t spend if you don’t need nursing care? The answer: long-term care insurance. Look into it and you might discover that it costs less than you think, especially if you start paying premiums before you’re 65.

So to me it makes perfect sense to want to die with zero. Not to reach zero before you die, which would leave you high and dry, but to have as little as possible left unused for all the time and energy you spent working to earn that money.

At the high end, retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.8 percent of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. That’s more than 88 percent left over—which means that a person retiring at 65 with half a million dollars still has more than $440,000 left at age 85!

Why didn’t retirees spend more of their money when they were young enough to enjoy it more fully? What were they waiting for?! There are a couple of answers to that question. The first is that people did have good intentions to spend the money, but once they reached a certain age, they found that their wants and needs changed, or perhaps diminished. Experts in retirement planning even have some lingo for this consumption pattern: go-go years, slow-go years, and no-go years. The idea is that when you’re first retired, you’re raring to have all those experiences you’ve been putting off until retirement, and you still (for the most part) have the health and energy to pursue those experiences. Those are your go-go years. Later on, typically in your seventies, you begin to slow down as you cross items off your bucket list and your health declines. And later still, in your eighties or beyond, you don’t have a whole lot of “go” left at all, no matter how much money you still have.

So always keep this end goal in mind. Make “maximize total life enjoyment” your mantra, using it to guide every decision—including what to focus on with your financial adviser. If you tell your fee-only financial adviser that you are trying to get as much enjoyment out of your savings as possible without outliving your savings, they can help you create a plan for making that happen. The

My point to you is that, like so many people who invest in real estate, Paulie was thinking only about return on equity—not about return on experience. To me that’s just another version of the same mistake I’m always harping about: earning and earning while forgetting that your whole point in earning money is to be able to spend it on the experiences that make your life what it is. Think

Recommendations Remember that “early” is right now. Of those experiences you thought about earlier, think about which ones would be appropriate to invest in today, this month, or this year. If you’re resisting having them now, consider the risk of not having them now. Think about the people you’d like to have experiences with—and picture the memory dividends you stand to gain from having those experiences sooner rather than later. Think about how you can actively enhance your memory dividends. Would it help you to take more photos of your experiences? To plan reunions with people you’ve shared good times with in the past? Compile a video or a photo album? 3 ​​ Why Die with Zero?

To fully enjoy life instead of just surviving it, you need to stop driving mindlessly and actively steer your life the way you want it to go. That won’t be the last time I say that—helping you live more deliberately is one of my biggest goals for this book.

That was when I realized that you retire on your memories. When you’re too frail to do much of anything else, you can still look back on the life you’ve lived and experience immense pride, joy, and the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia.

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

to get the most out of your time and money, timing matters.

But if you’re 70, you probably don’t want to wait until you’re 80! Your declining health—which means that the experience might not be available to you if you delay having it—

But if you’re 70, you probably don’t want to wait until you’re 80! Your declining health—which means that the experience might not be available to you if you delay having it—tells you to have the experience now.

So you see, thinking in terms of Would I rather? is really getting at the same issue as the personal interest rate: The older you get, the less willing you should be to delay an experience, even if someone pays you a lot of money to do so.

Recommendations Think about your current physical health: What life experiences can you have now that you might not be able to have later? Think of one way in which you can invest your time or your money to improve your health and thereby improve all of your future life experiences. Learn about how to improve your eating habits to improve your health. Of the many books on this subject, the one I know well and always recommend is Eat to Live, by Joel Fuhrman, M.D. Do more of the physical activities that you already enjoy (such as dancing or hiking) that will also improve your enjoyment of future experiences.

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

You just kind of assume that some things will last forever. But of course, they don’t. That’s sad, granted, but there’s good news: Just realizing that they don’t last forever, that everything eventually fades and dies, can make you appreciate everything more in the here and now.

Now, I’m not trying to be morbid, nor am I trying to present so much in the way of gloom and doom. My point—and this is important—is that the day I die and the day I stop being able to enjoy certain experiences are two distinctly different dates. And this is true for everyone.

then time passes and they find themselves in the senior pool and ask themselves how they wound up there!

The saddest, though, is when the realization doesn’t hit until you’re facing your own mortality, when it really is too late to change anything and all you can do is make peace with your past.

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. It’s a regret about not pursuing your dreams, and therefore having those dreams go unfulfilled.

the second regret—and actually the top regret among Ware’s male patients—was this: “I wish I had not worked so hard.” That hits right at the heart of what I’m preaching. “All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence,

team of psychologists asked one group of young students to imagine that they would be moving far away in 30 days, and told them to plan their next 30 days accordingly: It would be the students’ last chance for a very long time to enjoy all the special people and places they’d come to like about their college. In short, the students were urged to savor their remaining time on campus. Then, every week that month, the researchers asked the students to write down their activities. By contrast, another group of freshmen weren’t told to imagine anything or to do any kind of savoring of their days—they merely had to track their daily activities. Guess what happened? As you can imagine, the students in the first group were happier by the end of the 30 days than the second group. Whether they did more or just managed to squeeze more enjoyment out of whatever they did on a daily basis, the mere act of deliberately thinking about their time as limited definitely helped. What’s the takeaway here? Being aware that your time is limited can clearly motivate you to make the most of the time you do have. We’ve

Here’s what I suggest you do. Draw a timeline of your life from now to the grave, then divide it into intervals of five or ten years. Each of those intervals—say, from age 30 to 40, or from 70 to 75—is a time bucket, which is just a random grouping of years. Then think about what key experiences—activities or events—you definitely want to have during your lifetime. We all have dreams in life, but I have found that it’s extremely helpful to actually write them all down in a list. It doesn’t have to be a complete list; in fact, you can’t know right now everything you’ll ever want to do, because, as you know, new experiences and new people you meet tend to reveal unexpected additional interests that you’ll want to pursue. Life is all about discovery. And you will revisit this list later in life, too. But

By contrast, by dividing goals into time buckets, you are taking a much more proactive approach to your life. In effect, you’re looking ahead over several coming decades of your life and trying to plan out all the various activities, events, and experiences you’d like to have. Time buckets are proactive and let you plan your life; a bucket list, on the other hand, is a much more reactive effort in a sudden race against time.

Recommendations If time-bucketing your whole life feels a bit overwhelming, just do the exercise with three time buckets covering the next 30 years. Know you can always add more to your list; just do it long before your age and health become a real factor. If 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? 8 ​​ Know Your Peak Rule No.

But actually delaying gratification is helpful only to a point. If you have 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. So at what point is it better not to delay? Well,

So instead of engaging in “precautionary saving,” as economists call the practice, I’ll let the cards fall where they may. We all die sooner or later, and I’d rather die when the time is right than sacrifice my better years just to squeeze out a few more days at the tail end. Or, as I like to say, “See you at the grave!

The more money you have, the more you should be using this tactic, because your time is a lot more scarce and finite than your cash. I am constantly trading money back into time.

But what all this financial advice has in common is the idea of coming up with a single number—one financial target to shoot for and hit before you can safely start to draw down your savings. For those people who haven’t saved enough to live on in retirement—either because their income is too low or because they’ve been too much of a grasshopper—the focus on reaching a financial target does make sense. Without such a pinpointed target in mind, people who haven’t saved enough clearly risk ending up living out everyone’s worst-case scenario: running out of money and then being too old to go back to work.

What does all this mean for you? It means that unless you are an exception, you ought to start spending your wealth down much earlier than what is traditionally recommended. If you wait until you’re 65 or even 62 to dip into your nest egg, you will almost certainly end up working longer than necessary for money you will never get to spend. What a sad thought: to slave away at a job and never get the gold. Don’t

So it’s well worth your while to spend time and money improving or at least maintaining your health, whether by joining a ritzy gym (the kind you actually look forward to visiting), hiring a personal trainer, or following along with fitness videos.

But the logic of my experience works at any scale, from someone who leaves a six-figure job and can borrow money from their rich parents to guys who have only two nickels to rub together.

To understand why you should think in terms of a date, not a number, you need to recall that enjoying experiences requires a combination of money, free time, and health. You need all three—money alone is never enough. And 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 of something (money), but you are losing even more of something at least as valuable (free time and health). Here’s the bottom line: More money doesn’t equal more experience points.

But if we could go back in time, I would say: Don’t wait. Do the bold thing now, rather than in retirement, because the go-go years are very short. In general, this whole “I’ll wait to do this when I’m retired” is a massive blunder. But if you’ve already made that blunder, go ahead and make the most of the time you’ve got.

But so many people don’t take advantage of those times when they can easily take risks. And I think it’s because they magnify the downside in their minds—they think of the absolutely worst-case scenario, like homelessness, even if that scenario is not remotely realistic. As a result of that kind of fearful thinking, they don’t recognize the asymmetry in the risk they are facing: In their minds, it’s as if disastrous failure is as likely as any kind of success. A

Knowing Your Peak: It’s a Date, Not a Number

But in general, most people hit their peak between the ages of 45 and 60. That’s what our simulations show: For most people, waiting until they are past this age range causes suboptimal fulfillment results, because they end up dying with more than zero, running out of time in which to have many fulfilling experiences. Clearly,

Because that goal will have done its real job, of pushing you in the right direction: 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. That’s why dying with zero is a worthy goal—with this goal in mind, you are sure to get more out of your life than you otherwise would have.

In short, be careful not to be constantly seduced by money. Sure,

Recommendations Calculate your annual survival cost based on where you plan to live in retirement. Consult your doctor to get a read on your biological age and mortality; get all the objective tests you can afford that give you the status of your current health and eventual decline. Given your own health and history, think about when your enjoyment of those activities is likely to start declining in a noticeable way on an annual basis—and how the activities you love will be affected by this decline.

hope my message has at least jarred you into rethinking the standard and conventional approaches to living one’s life—get a good job, work hard through endless hours, and then retire in your sixties or seventies and live out your days in your so-called golden years. But I still ask you: Why wait until your health and life energy have begun to wane? Rather than just focusing on saving up for a big pot full of money that you will most likely not be able to spend in your lifetime, live your life to the fullest now: Chase memorable life experiences, give money to your kids when they can best use it, donate money to charity while you’re still alive. That’s the way to live life.

Bottom line? The 26-to-35 age range combines the best of all these considerations—old enough to be trusted with money, yet young enough to fully enjoy its benefits. What

Why Your Health Is More Valuable Than Your Money

So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.

The closer your death date is, the more urgency you need to have, and the further away it is, the more you can and should plan for the future.

Recommendations Consider at what ages you want to give money to your children, and how much you want to give. The same goes with giving money to charity. Discuss these issues with your spouse or partner. And do it today! Be sure to consult on these matters with an expert such as an estate planner or a lawyer as well.

Let’s say you are 10 pounds overweight. That doesn’t seem so bad at first, but each pound of excess weight means four extra pounds of force on your knees. Ten pounds of excess weight is equivalent to 40 pounds of excess force your knees were not designed to handle. Naturally, over time, the cartilage in your knees will deteriorate and tear, and perhaps your bones will start to rub against each other. Your natural shock absorbers have been worn out, making it painful for you to walk for any extended period, and running is pretty much unbearable. This leads to more weight gain and other associated problems. It’s no wonder that knee replacement surgery is one of the fastest-growing surgeries in the USA, closely tracking the rise in obesity. In any case, that seemingly inconsequential ten pounds ballooned via compounding into other serious health problems and a lack of enjoyment

The clear winner, with more than half the votes, was the age range 26 to 35. Why? Well, some people mentioned the time value of money and the power of compound interest, suggesting that the earlier you get the money, the better.

In the British Virgin Islands, on an island called Jost Van Dyke, there’s a great spot on the beach called the Soggy Dollar Bar. It has that name because there’s no dock; people anchor their boats a little ways offshore and literally swim up to the bar, paying for their famous Painkiller cocktail with wet dollars. Some people prefer to catch a ride on the back of a Seabob, which they can do, but if you like swimming, you get to have the full wet-dollar experience. Well,

Retirees in their sixties, seventies, and beyond—the other end of the spectrum—have abundant time (and often more money than young people), but, unfortunately, they have less health, and thus a diminished ability to enjoy the time and money they do have than the young do. What happens in between these two extremes? I think of this period as the real golden years because it usually includes a good combination of health and wealth.

Now, I don’t know the exact age of this peak, but based on what I know about human physiology and mental growth, between the ages of 26 and 35 seems about right, and 58 is clearly past that optimal point.

Your Real Legacy Isn’t Money

Your Legacy Is Now You already know my take on timing your spending in general: that it’s important. My number one rule is: Maximize your life experiences. So spend your money while you’re alive—whether it’s on yourself, your loved ones, or charity. And beyond that, find the optimal times to spend money. 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—not too late to make a big impact and not so soon that they might squander the money. But what about giving money to charity? With charity, there’s no such thing as too soon.

But ironically, the real golden years—the period of maximum potential enjoyment because we have the most health and wealth—mostly come before the traditional retirement age of 65. And those real golden years are the years during which we should be doing most of our spending, not delaying gratification.

Rule No. 5: Give money to your children or to charity when it has the most impact.

Ability to Enjoy Experiences Based on Health

Nothing has a greater effect on your ability to enjoy experiences—at any age—than your health. 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. And

But even when you include money as a consideration, the curve won’t skew right—you will find that the vast majority of the experiences you want to have will have to happen within about 20 years of midlife, in either direction—in other words, roughly between 20 and 60. People so often talk about saving for retirement. But there are far fewer conversations about saving for excellent and memorable life experiences that need to happen much sooner than the typical retirement age. If you look at the activities that are advertised in retirement commercials—a couple holding hands while strolling on a beautiful beach, a man holding a youngster on his shoulders—you’ll find that you actually want to do most of those things before you’re retired.

The Younger You Are, the Bolder You Should Be Bear in mind what I said about investing in experiences, especially when you’re young. The idea is that it’s always good to invest in experiences—but it’s especially good to do it when you’re young. Well, a similar logic applies to being bold: When you’re older, some risks become more foolish than bold.

It’s called consumption smoothing. Our incomes might vary from one month or one year to another, but that doesn’t mean our spending should reflect those variations—we would be better off if we evened out those variations. To do that, we need to basically transfer money from years of abundance into the leaner years. That’s one use of savings accounts. But in my case, I had been using my savings account totally backwards—I was taking money away from my starving younger self to give to my future wealthier self! No wonder Joe called me an idiot.

The Books Lucia’s birthday gifts for September 1st: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and Peter Pan and Wendy by J. M. Barrie 2nd: Burglar Bill by Janet and Allan Ahlberg 3rd: Dogger by Shirley Hughes 4th: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll 5th: Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter 6th: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame 7th: The Borrowers by Mary Norton 8th: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett 9th: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell 10th: Matilda by Roald Dahl 11th: Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott 12th: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 13th: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 14th: Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman 15th: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters 16th: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen 17th: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson 18th: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 19th: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 20th: Passing by Nella Larsen 21st: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 22nd: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood 23rd: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell 24th: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie 25th: The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes 26th: Atonement by Ian McEwan 27th: Small Island by Andrea Levy 28th: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 29th: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson 30th: Harvest by Jim Crace 31st: A Secret Garden by Katie Fforde 32nd: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel From Lucia’s life Bird at My Window by Rosa Guy Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle The Owl Service by Alan Garner The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault Story of O by Pauline Réage Illustrated Peter Pan by Arthur Rackham Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie Marina’s recommendation Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder The book club at September’s house The Color Purple by Alice Walker Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Silas Marner by George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss also mentioned) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The book club’s birthday books for September’s 34th birthday Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters We Are Displaced by Malala Yousafzai To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

La energía vital son todas las horas que estás vivo para hacer cosas, y siempre que trabajas empleas parte de esa energía vital finita. Por tanto cualquier cantidad de dinero que hayas ganado mediante tu trabajo representa la cantidad de energía vital que has empleado ganando ese dinero. Eso es cierto independientemente de lo mucho o poco que te pague tu trabajo.

you can take the safer path of quiet misery or the bolder path that’s less certain but potentially much more rewarding, both financially and psychologically.

Between the Ant and the Grasshopper The idea that you retire on your memories runs completely counter to most of what we normally hear about retirement. As workers in the United States, we’re constantly getting the message that we must save for retirement, that we need to regularly sock money away into a 401(k) plan or IRA. That’s just the grown-up version of lessons we learned as kids about the need to save for a rainy day. The best-remembered variant of the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, for example, has the ant sitting pretty (and pretty smug) after harvesting his grain, while the grasshopper goes hungry after spending his whole summer playing. That retelling leaves no doubt about which of the two insects had done the right thing, and it sure wasn’t the fun-loving, shortsighted grasshopper. But don’t get me wrong: My point isn’t that we should be just like the grasshopper, failing to save for the winter of our life, or that any amount we spend on experiences is worth it because experiences are the stuff of life. That would be foolish. What I’m saying is that our culture tends to overemphasize the virtues of the ant—of hard work and delayed gratification—at the cost of other virtues. As a result, we fail to appreciate that the grasshopper was onto something, too. So, yes, the grasshopper would be better off to save a little—and, yes, the ant would be better off to live a little!

The main idea here is that your life is the sum of your experiences. This just means that everything you do in life—all the daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences you have—adds up to who you are. When you look back on your life, the richness of those experiences will determine your judgment of how full a life you’ve led. So it stands to reason that you should put some serious thought and effort into planning the kinds of experiences that you want for yourself. Without that kind of deliberate planning, you’re bound to just follow our culture’s well-trodden, default path through life—to coast on autopilot. You’ll get to your destination (death) but probably without having the kind of journey you would have actively chosen for yourself.

you retire on your memories. When you’re too frail to do much of anything else

consumption smoothing.

Web site (soa.org)