Page 11 Life energy is all the hours that you’re alive to do things—and whenever you work, you spend some of that finite life energy. So any amount of money you’ve earned through your work represents the amount of life energy you spent earning that money. That is true regardless of how much or how little your work pays. So even if you’re earning only $8 an hour, spending that $8 also means spending an hour’s worth of your life energy.
Page 18 My overarching goal is to get you to think about your life in a more purposeful, deliberate manner, instead of simply doing things as you and others have always done them. Yes, I want you to plan for your future—but never in such a way that you forget to enjoy the present. We all get one ride on this roller coaster of life.
Page 33 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.
Page 42 For some people, it can be the same with working for money—it is just easier to keep doing what you’ve been doing, especially when what you’ve been doing continues to reward you with society’s universal form of recognition for a job well done, aka money. Once you’re in the habit of working for money to live, the thrill of making money exceeds the thrill of actually living.
Page 67 Without an annuity, on the other hand, you are forced to self-insure—to be your own insurance agent. That’s not a great idea, because unlike the insurance agents who work for big insurance companies, you don’t have the ability to pool risk and cancel out errors on both sides. So, to feel financially secure until the end of your days, you will have to leave a large cushion to cover the worst-case scenario: You will have to oversave, which means that more likely than not you will end up dying with considerable money left over. You’ll have worked for years earning money that you never got to enjoy. So by trying to play insurance agent, you are not even close to maximizing your life. Again, this is why you are not a good insurance agent!
Page 78 When one of these good friends poses this inevitable question—“What about the kids?”—I first explain that the money you’re leaving to your kids is not your money. So when I say you should die with zero, I’m not saying: Die with zero and spend all your kids’ money along the way. I’m saying: Spend all your money.
Page 84 Autopilot is easy, and it’s what most people around you are doing. So when you look around and do what everyone else is doing, you’ll be coasting on autopilot just like everyone else. In fact, you might not even realize you’re doing it.
Page 87 You always get more value out of money before your health begins to inevitably decline. 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.
Page 92 I am making a big deal about quantifying the value of experiences with your children because doing so forces you to pause and think about what’s really best for your kids: Sometimes it is earning more money, and sometimes it is spending more time with them. 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.
Page 94 Is each additional hour of work you do really worth it to you and your children? Does your work add to your legacy—or does it actually serve to deplete it?
Page 95 If you really think through the implications of saying that your legacy consists of experiences with your children, the conclusion you reach might be somewhat radical: That is, once you have enough money to take care of your family’s basic needs, then by going to work to earn more money, you might actually be depleting your kids’ inheritance because you are spending less time with them!
Page 124 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 of activities associated with walking. As I’ve stated before, movement is life, and your experiences will be greatly diminished when your movement becomes painful or limited. There are many paths of decay until we ultimately die. We all wish to have the greatest physical function until we die, yet many of us will have greater exponential decay at an earlier time in our lives—resulting in lower ability and lower enjoyment—as a result of how we have treated our bodies. Einstein supposedly called compound interest the greatest force in the universe. Small changes in health can lead to a negative compounding that has enormous impacts on your lifetime fulfillment and experience points.
Page 128 If you pay to get out of doing tasks you don’t enjoy, you are simultaneously reducing the number of negative life experiences and increasing the number of positive life experiences (for which you now have more time). How can that not make you happier with your life? You might realize with some regret that you got the balance wrong—for example, let’s say that you’re now 35 or 40, and in your twenties you spent all your time making money and therefore missed out on lots of great experiences. Although you’ll never get those years back, you can try to rebalance your life now. Therefore, you need to really focus on having more experiences now, while you still have a high degree of health, and spending more than a person your age who didn’t trade all that time for money.
Page 137 the day I die and the day I stop being able to enjoy certain experiences are two distinctly different dates.
Page 153 Or . . . I could have not splurged on that lavish party when I was 45. Instead I could have celebrated my birthday by just looking at my monthly investment savings and IRA statements. But what kind of memory would that be? Look, many of us are inclined to delay gratification and save for the future. And the ability to delay gratification serves us well. Being able to get to work on time, paying everyday bills, taking care of our kids, putting food on the table—these are the essentials in life. 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?
Page 162 But a number should not be most people’s main goal. One reason is that, psychologically, no number will ever feel like enough.
Page 163 Most people forget those costs of acquiring more money, so they focus mainly on the gains. So, for example, $2.5 million does buy you a better quality of life than $2 million, all other things being equal—but all other things are usually not equal! That’s because for every additional day you spend working, you sacrifice an equivalent amount of free time, and during that time your health gradually declines, too. If you wait five years to stop saving, your overall health declines by five years, closing the window on certain experiences altogether. In sum, from my perspective, the years you spend earning that extra $500,000 do not make up for (let alone surpass) the number of experience points you lost by working for more money instead of enjoying those five years of free time.
Page 168 Our culture’s focus on work is like a seductive drug. It takes all of your yearning for discovery and wonder and experiences, promising to give you the means (money) to get all those things—but the focus on the work and the money becomes so single-minded and automatic that you forget what you were yearning for in the first place. The poison becomes the medicine—that’s nuts!
Page 170 Trust me—it’s really not that hard to spend a lot of money doing things you love. But you do have to take some time to first consciously figure out what those appealing expenditures are for you. Using himself as an example of this idea, the behavioral economist Meir Statman has said that he finds travel by business class worth every penny—but doesn’t feel that way about fine dining at all. “I can afford a $300 meal, but it makes me feel stupid—like the chef is in the back laughing uproariously.” The point is that what you spend money on is up to you. Isn’t it worth your while to think about what you value and put your money behind that?
Page 173 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.
Page 187 Everything I’ve said in this chapter points to being bold when you’re young. But there are ways to be bold as an older person, too. And those have to do with being brave enough to spend your hard-earned money. You have to have the courage to do the things I described in the “Know Your Peak” chapter—the courage to walk away from a career so that you can spend your remaining time doing what’s more fulfilling. People are more afraid of running out of money than wasting their life, and that’s got to switch. 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?
Page 188 I figured that if the post office was always hiring, and provided a safe income, I could always go work there if all else failed; but there’s no need to start there.
Page 189 Second, 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.
Page 192 Remember: In the end, the business of life is the acquisition of memories.
