Die with Zero Chapter 2: Invest in Experiences

What are your favorite memories? A few come to mind for me, including the trips we’ve taken as a family. When Kelli and I were teachers, we would spend a good deal of our summer break on road trips. We drove to places from LA to Vermont, and many in between. Traveling with small children (often at least one baby) wasn’t easy, but looking back that’s part of the fun we have when reminiscing. There was one day in particular we bit off more than we could chew. We left the Philadelphia area very early in the morning (we were there for a college friends’ wedding), stopped in New York City to visit my brother and his wife (unsuccessfully trying to beat the traffic into Manhattan), and finished the day by driving to a friend's house in northern Vermont. Over 400 miles, hours spent in NYC traffic, all with a 1.5 year old in tow (oh, and Kelli was 7 months pregnant). Sophia had been great in the car up to that point, but the drive from NYC to Vermont she was not happy. Crying inconsolable for hours. We were about two hours from our destination when she finally fell asleep. Within 30 seconds, we had to drive over railroad tracks that were very rough, and even after slowing down, it jossled the car enough to wake her up so the crying continued for the rest of the drive. We’ve thought back to that moment and laughed more than once in the years since.

Perkins recommends investing in experiences early because of the “memory dividend” they pay. Meaning, as much happiness as our road trips brought us in the moment, they continue to pay dividends now when we remember them. The earlier you enjoy an experience, the longer you have to remember it, thus increasing the overall value/worth of that experience. See his chart, where you can aim to increase year to year the experiences you have (the white portions), but on top of that you also get the joy of remembering the prior years, resulting in a compounding growth effect on life.

This is why we ought to invest in experiences, and do so early. As mentioned in chapter 1, Perkins is functioning with a few ideas that you may or may not find convincing. While I’m fond of Perkins' point that the value of an experience lies beyond the event in the form of memory dividends, I’m not convinced of his premise that “Your whole point in earning money is to be able to spend it on the experiences that make your life what it is.” My two reservations are first that this premise (as well as another mentioned in chapter 1, that “Your life is the sum of your experiences”) appears in part if not in whole to be a tautology. I’m not sure what other options there are (logically) for earning money, if not to spend it on “experiences” in your life. Whether it’s for a vacation, for dinner, for charity, or even to enable you to go to work the next day to earn more because you’re Scrooge McDuck. If you never spend the money other than to create space for you to earn more of it, that itself is a way to spend it on the experiences you want.

Secondly, it makes our individual life (through fulfilling our desired experiences) the focus, the end, the telos, of everything we do. While the outcome of working, earning money, spending it on oneself might be the same, there can be the opposite focus: service to others. Going to work to serve others, while also earning income so that with it you can serve others. Surely there are some for which these are the "experiences" they wish to have, and in that sense would fit with Perkins’ proposals, but the intent is an important distinction with potential moral implications.

At Brockmann Financial we have three core values. The first is Love Your Neighbor (for us, this means chiefly the clients whom we serve and each other as co-workers). This is not done for our individual and personal benefit, but for the benefit of the other. The reason we don’t provide our services for free is that if we did, we would no longer be able to serve our clients. We could not make payroll, invest in professional development to better serve our clients, expand our reach to help more people, etc. So for us, the end of earning money, while very beneficial personally (it enables me to go on road trips with my family), is aimed at a different end. Though not necessary, a virtuous life worth living may be one of partial or complete suffering, of unenjoyable experiences endured for the benefit of others. This is not the sense in which Perkins’ encourages us to spend our money, and if it is, then his premise is indeed a tautology that, while true, is much less helpful.

Perkins’ recommendation: “Think about the people you'd like to have experiences with — and picture the memory dividends you stand to gain from having those experiences sooner rather than later.”

My recommendation: Include in the experiences you want to have at least some service to others. What often fills our tank, is filling others’.

Let us know

• What are your fondest memories?

• Do you own a digital picture frame that cycles through past experiences, so that you may enjoy them anew? If not, will you consider purchasing one?

Until next time, happy reading!