Bill Perkins ran an energy hedge fund. He made his money on the proposition that most traders mismodel the risk distribution of natural-gas futures, and the proposition was correct often enough that he was, by the end of his trading career, a person whose net worth ran into the hundreds of millions. In 2020 he published Die With Zero, a book that argues most people mismodel the risk distribution of their own lives. The argument is the same shape: you think the right tail matters more than it does, and you underweight the present because you mistake survival for success. The book is the closest a mainstream finance author has come to the SuicideFire position. It is worth reading. It is also worth reading carefully, because Perkins stops one move short of the conclusion his own math demands, and the missing move is the move that, taken honestly, changes the planning of anyone who reads him.
The thesis
Perkins’s central claim is a portfolio-management claim applied to time. Money has a use value; that use value declines as you age, because your capacity to convert dollars into experience declines. A backpacking trip through Patagonia at 32 is not the same product as a backpacking trip through Patagonia at 72, even if the line item on your credit card statement looks identical. By the time most savers reach the spending phase of their plans, the goods they were saving to buy are no longer for sale to the version of them that has arrived.
From this Perkins derives what he calls the terminal value of zero. If experiences have utility and dollars do not (after you are dead, dollars are zero to you), the optimal life-portfolio target is to die with the smallest possible remaining balance. Not by accident — by design. He frames inheritance as a separate, earlier transaction (give it while you and the recipients can both use it) and charity the same way. What remains in the account at the funeral is, in Perkins’s framing, a planning error.
The math is correct. Nothing in the standard economics literature contradicts it. What is striking is that almost no financial planner you have ever met operates on this assumption.
What he gets right
Three things, and they are not small.
First, the terminal value of zero is the math-optimal outcome under any honest utility function. If a dollar at 95 buys less than a dollar at 45 — and it does — then the right curve of spending is front-loaded, not flat. Perkins is the only mainstream author to state this plainly. The conventional 4% rule, by contrast, optimizes for portfolio survival rather than user satisfaction; it treats the two as proxies, and they are not.
Second, the memory dividend. Perkins’s framing here is genuinely useful. An experience does not deliver its full utility in the moment of consumption. It delivers utility for as long as you remember it, and a small additional dividend each time the memory is shared. A two-week trip at 28 has been generating dividends for forty years by the time you are 68. A two-week trip purchased at 78 has, statistically, twelve years left to compound, and probably fewer in any vivid form. Buying the trip early is not indulgence. It is duration arbitrage.
Third, age-banding. Perkins suggests breaking life into five- or ten-year buckets and asking, of each bucket, what experiences are physically available to you in that window and not later. Climbing has a window. So does dancing past midnight. So, in a quieter way, does noticing how your parents look across the table. The bucket framing forces the question Americans avoid: what is the latest age at which this is still on the menu. The honest answer is often startlingly young.
What he gets wrong
Perkins is a hedge fund manager, and the book carries his trade. The places where it stumbles are the places where someone who optimizes for return per unit of risk underestimates the psychology of the human he is selling the framework to.
The first error is psychological resistance to drawdown. Perkins assumes that, once shown the math, readers will adjust. They will not. Saving is a habit, often a lifetime habit, often a defense against an anxiety that predates the savings account. Asking a 58-year-old who has saved for 35 years to begin drawing the balance down on purpose is not asking him to do arithmetic. It is asking him to disassemble the only psychological structure that has made the arithmetic possible. Perkins acknowledges this in passing and moves on. He should have spent a hundred pages on it.
The second error is the linear value of experience. Not all experiences memory-dividend. A bachelor-party weekend in Vegas at 38 will be remembered, charitably, in fragments. The high-status trips Perkins describes — Burning Man, safaris, private islands — are weighted in his examples partly because they are the experiences his peer group buys. A quiet Tuesday in October when your child first reads a chapter book aloud delivers more memory dividend than most of his case studies, at zero marginal cost. The framework does not distinguish. The reader is left believing that maximizing experience means maximizing purchases. It does not.
The third error is more stylistic than structural. The book leans on gimmick. The time buckets, the Net Fulfillment Curve, the Life Energy concept — these are McKinsey-deck artifacts. They are useful for getting an idea past a skeptical reader’s defenses. They are not useful for sitting with the idea once it is in. A philosophy worth taking seriously does not need a chart with arrows.
The move he cannot make
This is the heart of the critique, and it is the place where Die With Zero stops being a SuicideFire text and reveals itself as a longevity-leaning one.
Perkins’s framework accepts mortality. It does not accept planning around mortality. Throughout the book, the implicit horizon is whatever the actuarial tables say it should be — 85, 90, sometimes longer. He says you should die with zero; he does not say you should choose when zero is. The terminal point is treated as exogenous. Roll the dice, optimize the path, see what happens. The framework is doing portfolio-management math on a duration the framework declines to interrogate. Any commodities trader who tried this on his desk would be fired by Tuesday. The honest answer to how long is this position open is the first input on any sane risk model. Perkins, on his own life, leaves the input blank and treats the blank as a feature.
The Williams move — the move from his 1973 essay on the Makropulos case — is the one Perkins will not make. Williams argued that a life of indefinite extension is not a coherent object of human desire, because the categorical desires that constitute a person’s identity exhaust themselves within a finite horizon. Past that horizon, you are not extending your life. You are postponing its conclusion while occupying its remains. Perkins gives you the math for spending the portfolio down. He does not give you the math for closing the horizon down. The first is uncomfortable. The second is heretical, and he is not in the business of heresy. The trade Perkins makes here is, frankly, a commercial one. The book had to be sellable to a Barnes & Noble shopper at JFK. The chapter that would have pushed his framework to its logical conclusion would have lost him half the audience in the first paragraph.
Where SuicideFire goes further is exactly here. The honest planning question is not how do I spend this $1.2M between now and an unknown date the insurance industry will assign me. The honest question is what is the latest date at which my categorical desires remain alive, and how do I budget back from there. Perkins’s framework, applied with that honest horizon, collapses to something tighter and more useful than the book itself proposes. The terminal value of zero arrives sooner. The Big Year exercises happen at 50 and 55, not at 75. The portfolio is smaller. The math becomes possible for many more people than Perkins’s case studies suggest. The people for whom his framework is barely possible — the late-career professionals who, on his numbers, will need to keep working through their early sixties to fund the curve — turn out, on the SuicideFire horizon, to be already past their walk-away point and unaware of it.
The asymmetry of the two errors is worth sitting with. Perkins’s framework, applied honestly to a 92-year horizon, will produce some readers who die at 84 with $400k still in the account — a planning error he correctly identifies. The same framework, applied to a 65-year-horizon reader who would have used the framework’s logic to walk away at 52, produces readers who spend a decade more in chairs they did not want to be in, because the framework told them the chair was the rational price of the curve. The first error costs money. The second error costs years. The second is the larger error. Perkins does not acknowledge it because, on the framework’s own terms, it is invisible.
Read it anyway
None of this is a reason not to read the book. Die With Zero is, as of this writing, the best mainstream entry point to the central SuicideFire argument. It is written for people who would never pick up Bernard Williams and would close Seneca after three pages. It puts the math on the page in a register most readers can metabolize. It earns its place on the shelf, and the shelf is more crowded with books that earn less.
But know what you are getting. Perkins is a brilliant translator of the philosophy into the language of his class. He is not, himself, the philosopher. He shows you the door, walks you to it, hands you the key, and then declines to follow you through. Read him, take the key, and keep going. The room past the door is colder than his book describes. It is also where the planning that actually works for a finite life gets done.
Recommended reading: Bernard Williams, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” (1973). Read after Perkins. The two books are arguing the same point from opposite ends.
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