I’ve been financially comfortable for a while now. I’m fully aware that’s a privilege most people don’t have, and I don’t take it for granted. But being comfortable created its own kind of problem: I had no idea what I was actually working toward.
For years, my financial planning consisted of “save more, invest passively, check balances occasionally.” The implicit goal was some vague notion of “enough” — a number that would let me stop worrying. But I never defined what I’d do when I got there, or what I was sacrificing along the way.
This month, I finally sat down to actually model it out. What started as a spreadsheet exercise turned into something more interesting: a philosophical reframe about what money is actually for.
The Traditional FIRE Trap
If you spend time in personal finance circles, you’ve probably encountered FIRE. The basic math is elegant: save 25x your annual expenses, withdraw 4% per year, and you’ll statistically never run out of money.
The problem is what this optimizes for: never running out. That’s a fear-based framing. And when I actually modeled my trajectory, I discovered something uncomfortable: following the traditional 4% rule, I’d likely die with millions of dollars unspent.
That’s not a humblebrag. It’s a planning failure. Every dollar I don’t spend or give away is an experience I didn’t have, a cause I didn’t support, a family member I didn’t help when it would’ve mattered most.
Enter “Die With Zero”
Bill Perkins’ book Die With Zero reframes the question entirely. Instead of “how do I never run out?”, it asks “how do I extract maximum life from my resources?”
The core insights that hit me:
Experiences have “memory dividends.” A trip you take at 35 pays returns for 50 years in memories. The same trip at 85—if you can even take it—pays returns for maybe 5 years. Front-load experiences.
Give while living. Helping a sibling in their 30s when they’re building a career matters more than leaving them an inheritance in their 60s when they’re already established. Give when you can see the impact.
Your net worth should peak, then decline. If your wealth keeps climbing into your 70s and 80s, you’re not converting it into life. You’re just accumulating numbers.
This felt like permission I didn’t know I needed.
Building the Model
I’m an engineer. When I have a fuzzy problem, I build a model. So I created a spreadsheet that tracks portfolio value from now through age 100, accounting for:
- Different spending levels across life phases (the “spending smile”—high early, lower in your 60s-70s, higher again for healthcare in your 80s)
- Side income from part-time work (I don’t plan to fully stop working, just work differently)
- Giving that phases out as I age (front-loaded toward family and causes)
- Social Security with a haircut for potential future cuts
- Inflation and variable return assumptions
The model let me answer questions like: “What if I give $25K/year instead of $5K?” or “What happens if I retire at 42 instead of 45?” or “How conservative do my return assumptions need to be before I’m in trouble?”
The Reframe
Here’s what the modeling revealed: my “problem” isn’t whether I’ll have enough. It’s that I’ve been too conservative about deploying what I have.
Traditional FIRE told me to minimize spending and maximize runway. Die With Zero told me to think about what I actually want from my remaining decades and work backward from there.
The questions shifted:
- Not “can I afford this trip?” but “what experiences am I missing by not taking it?”
- Not “how much should I save for giving?” but “who can I help now, while it matters?”
- Not “what’s my safe withdrawal rate?” but “what’s my deployment rate—spending plus giving as a percentage of resources?”
The Calculator
I turned the model into an interactive calculator that anyone can use. It compares traditional FIRE (4% rule, preserve principal forever) against a Die With Zero approach (spend and give deliberately, target near-zero at end of life).
The side-by-side visualization makes the tradeoff visceral. With the same starting point, you can see:
- How much more you could spend each year
- How much more lifetime giving becomes possible
- How much less you leave “wasted” at the end
It’s not financial advice—reality has way more variables than any model captures. But it’s a useful thinking tool for anyone wrestling with these questions.
What I’m Actually Changing
The modeling led to some concrete decisions:
More intentional giving. I’m setting up recurring donations to causes I care about and planning annual gifts to family members while they’re young enough for it to matter.
Higher “experience budget.” I’ve been living below my means not out of necessity but out of inertia. Time to actually take the trips, host the gatherings, say yes to things.
Redefining “retirement.” I don’t want to stop working; I want to work differently. Focus on projects I’m passionate about, especially open-source and non-profits. Part-time consulting on projects I choose, enough income to reduce portfolio reliance but not so much that work crowds out life.
Longer time horizon, less anxiety. Modeling to age 100 sounds morbid (or unrealistic depending on your perspective), but it’s clarifying. When you see that you’re fine even in conservative scenarios, the daily market noise matters less.
The Uncomfortable Part
I’m aware this whole post is about a privileged problem. Most people are worried about making rent, not optimizing their withdrawal rate. I don’t have answers for that asymmetry.
What I can offer is this: the mental models apply at any scale. “Deploy your resources deliberately” works whether you have $10K or $10M. “Give while living” works whether it’s $50 or $50K. “Experiences over accumulation” is a philosophical stance, not a portfolio size.
And maybe the calculator is useful to someone else thinking through these questions. That’s why I’m sharing it.
The FIRE Lifestyle Calculator is free to use. If you build on it or find it useful, I’d love to hear about it.