Bill Perkins Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Start thinking more about how to use your limited time and vital energy, and you'll be well on your way to living the fullest life possible.”

“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.”

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

“The key takeaway is to strike the right balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.”

“The premise of this book is that you should focus on maximizing the enjoyment of your life instead of maximizing your wealth. These are two very different goals.

Money is nothing more than a means to an end. Having money helps you achieve the most important goal of enjoying your life; but trying to maximize your money actually gets in the way of reaching the most important goal.

Therefore, always keep this ultimate goal in mind. Make 'maximizing the total enjoyment of your life' your mantra, using it to guide every decision, including what to focus on with your financial advisor.”

“The senselessness of indefinitely delayed gratification.”

“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.”

“Thinking about death can be distressing, so we tend to avoid doing it, behaving as if it were never going to happen.

We keep postponing wonderful experiences, as if in our last month of life we could stuff all those experiences postponed throughout our lives. Needless to say, that's not possible, so it's completely unreasonable.”

“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.”

“What good os wealth without health?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”