I have been thinking about a book called “Die With Zero.”
Maybe you have read it. Maybe you have heard someone talk about it at dinner, or seen it recommended in a financial newsletter, or had a conversation with a parent who is suddenly very interested in taking the family on safari in Africa this summer. (A friend of SageVault is actually doing this!)
The idea at the center of the book is this: stop saving your life for later. Spend it. Give generously while you are alive. Create experiences instead of accumulating wealth. The money you leave behind unspent is life you did not live.
Bill Perkins calls the return on those experiences “memory dividends.” The trip you took at 40 is still paying out in meaning and connection at 70. The money spent on it is gone. The memory compounds forever.
I believe him. I have seen enough of what people leave behind, and what they do not, to know that the families who spent time and money on each other — who showed up, who gave, who said yes to the things that mattered — carry something the others do not. A warmth. A shared story. A sense that they were known and loved and chosen.
That is real. That compounds.
And there is a chapter missing from the book.
What it feels like on the other side.
I want you to imagine something.
Your parent lived fully. They took the trips. They gave generously: helped with down payments, covered a medical bill, flew everyone in for a milestone birthday. They spent their money on the people and experiences they loved. And then they were gone.
Now you are the executor.
You are sitting at their kitchen table with a cup of coffee that has gone cold, going through their papers, and you are trying to piece together a life from the outside. You know they lived it fully. You felt it. You were there for some of it. But you are discovering, one folder at a time, that the map does not exist.
You do not know what accounts are still open. You do not know which of the gifts they gave were loans and which were gifts. You do not know why your brother received help with his house and whether that was meant to be counted against his inheritance or not. You do not know what they wanted done with the things still in the house, the art, the furniture, the box of photographs that goes back three generations.
You know they loved you. You felt that every day. But love and clarity are not the same thing. And right now, sitting at that table, you need both.
The warm hand needs a story.
Perkins’ most beautiful idea is what he calls giving with a warm hand. Help your children when they are young and the money changes their lives. Be there to see it. Witness the joy. Do not wait until you are gone and they are 55 and the inheritance arrives like a letter from someone they used to know.
That instinct is one of the most human things in the book. What it needs, and what makes it a complete gift rather than a generous act, is the story around it. Not the legal record, though that matters too. The story. Why you gave what you gave. What you hoped it would mean. What you wanted them to know about why that particular moment felt right to you.
A gift without a story is just money. A gift with a story is a piece of someone’s heart that the person receiving it gets to carry forward.
That is the memory dividend Perkins did not write about. Not the one that pays out to the giver. The one that pays out to the people left behind.
What I have seen in this work.
Every executor I have worked with has said some version of the same thing. Not “I wish they had left more.” Not “I wish the process had been easier,” though it is always harder than anyone expects.
What they say is: “I wish I knew what they were thinking.”
They want to understand the intention behind the decisions. They want to know that what they are doing honors what the person they loved actually wanted. They want to feel, in the middle of something logistically overwhelming, that the person they lost is still somehow present in the process.
A documented giving plan does that. A letter of instruction does that. A conversation, written down or recorded or simply witnessed by someone else who can speak to it later, does that.
It is not paperwork. It is presence. It is a way of staying in the room after you have left it.
Perkins is right about almost everything.
Spend your money on experiences. Give generously while you can see the impact. Stop treating wealth as a score to maximize. Live your life in the seasons it was meant to be lived, not in a long careful accumulation toward a future you may never reach.
All of that is true. All of that is right.
The families who pull it off — who actually live that philosophy fully and close it cleanly, whose executors inherit a clear picture rather than a beautiful mystery — are the ones who treated the giving as intentionally as the living. Who documented as they went. Who had the conversation. Who left not just the memory of a life well lived, but the map of it.
That is what makes “Die With Zero” a gift to everyone. Not just to yourself.
And that, if I am being honest about why I do this work, is exactly what I am trying to help people build.
