Any one of us could be here today and gone tomorrow. And yet it’s also possible that even the oldest among us has years, maybe even decades, of time left.
That uncertainty sits underneath a lot of financial decisions, even when we don’t name it. Most of us carry two fears at once. The first is spending too freely now and running out of money later. The second is the opposite: saving for a someday that arrives too late, or never arrives at all, whether because life is short or because our health doesn’t hold long enough to enjoy what we put away.
Those two fears pull in opposite directions. Spend now and you risk the first. Defer everything and you risk the second. Most of the financial advice I come across leans hard toward one side or the other. What I keep looking for is a way to account for both at the same time.
A Different Way to Picture It
I recently listened to “Die with Zero” by Bill Perkins. His core argument is that we wait too long to enjoy the life we’re building, and that a lot of us die with money we never converted into anything that mattered to us.
Two of his ideas stuck with me. The first is to think of your life in buckets of time, say five-year increments, and to make sure each bucket holds some of the experiences that bring you joy rather than saving them all for the end. The second is what he calls “memory dividends,” which I’ll come back to.
I don’t agree with everything in the book, and I’m not interested in literally spending down to zero. But the bucket idea is useful to me for a reason Perkins doesn’t emphasize as much. It’s a way to account for both fears at once.
Why Spreading It Out Works
There’s a reason clustering your best experiences into one stretch of life doesn’t work as well as you’d think.
When I was a kid, the years all blended together. But my family remembers one of them clearly. They remember it as the year I was eleven. Almost every major childhood story we repeat when we get together seems to have happened that year. Strangely, that doesn’t seem to be the case for my brother and sister. For whatever reason, my eleventh year got packed with the kind of moments we still talk about.
As an adult, I’ve noticed there are diminishing returns when your greatest hits all happen at once. A once-in-a-lifetime trip feels less rare when another one happens a few months later. But the opposite is just as real. Delay those experiences too long and some of them never happen at all.
Spreading them across the buckets is the hedge. If life turns out short, you’ve already been collecting moments along the way rather than banking them for an end that didn’t come. If life turns out long, you haven’t blown through everything early and left the later decades empty. You don’t have to spend everything now, and you don’t have to defer everything either. Each bucket gets a few moments worth remembering, and the balance between now and later stays intact.
Memory Dividends
This is the second idea that stuck with me, and it’s the part that keeps paying you back long after the money is gone.
A memory dividend is what you get when a past experience comes back to you. A story, an image, a familiar scent or taste can pull you straight back into a moment you lived years ago. The experience keeps paying out, again and again, for the rest of your life.
Some of those dividends cost nothing. When I’m out for a walk on a brisk day and catch a whiff of smoke from a chimney, I’m transported back to being a kid getting ready to go sledding on a snow day.
Others were paid for. The smell of sage takes me back to sunrise Jeep rides on safari in South Africa, where the wild herb grew everywhere. The taste of a particular wine brings me back to my first trip to Napa, and the evenings spent sharing the bottle with friends by the fire.
And then there’s the one I come back to most. Hearing about someone’s wedding, or seeing a photo from my own, brings me right back to my wife and me dancing alone outside together on the portico of our venue toward the end of the night. The portico was only available to us because we paid an extra fee. The photo I have of that moment exists because we hired a photographer who was a little outside our budget but was willing to stay a little later into the reception.
That memory will stay with me forever. Jamie and I both think of it often when we find ourselves having a quiet moment together.
What This Looks Like in Your Own Life
It’s easy to read this as permission to spend, and that’s not quite the point. The bucket idea only works because it respects both fears. The money still has to last. The future still matters. What changes is the recognition that the future isn’t the only thing that matters, and that some experiences only pay their dividends if you actually have them.
Rather than looking back and judging whether you’ve spent the last decade well, it’s more useful to look forward. Think about the bucket you’re in right now, the next five years or so.
What are the experiences you’d want this stretch of your life to be remembered for?
What are the memory dividends you’d want paying out twenty years from now that you haven’t set in motion yet?
It’s worth saying that these don’t have to be trips, and they don’t have to be expensive. The dividends that matter most are personal, and they look different for everyone. For some people it’s a hobby taken up seriously, or a tradition built with the people they love, or time spent on something close to home that they never seem to regret. The chimney smoke from a childhood snow day didn’t cost anything and yet is still paying out.
Others will cost more than feels comfortable in the moment. The portico fee and the photographer felt like a lot at the time. They’ve paid us back many times over since.
That’s the tradeoff worth weighing. Whether each bucket of your life is getting a few moments worth remembering, without robbing the buckets still ahead of you.
— Brad
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This is meant to help you think through financial decisions and tradeoffs—not tell you exactly what to do. It’s general in nature and not personalized advice (see full disclaimer).