Hetty Green was, by most reckonings, the richest woman in America when she died in 1916. She left behind perhaps $100m, a sum that inflation has since turned into several billion in today’s money.
She also wore the same black dress until it turned green at the seams, ate her porridge cold to save the cost of heating it, and was once said to have spent half a night searching her carriage for a lost two-cent stamp.
The story most often repeated about her, and I should flag that some of it has surely grown in the telling, is that when her son injured his leg as a boy, she hunted so determinedly for free treatment that the wound was left to fester. The leg was eventually amputated. She died with a fortune that two world wars and a century of inflation have barely dented, having apparently enjoyed almost none of it.
We call people like Hetty misers, shake our heads, and quietly assume the lesson doesn’t apply to us.
It does. Just gently.
This is the argument at the heart of Bill Perkins’ Die With Zero, which I’ve just read for the second time and liked rather more than the first. Perkins is an energy trader and professional poker player, so he thinks about risk and expected value for a living. His thesis is blunt: the goal of a financial life isn’t to die with the biggest pile. It’s to turn your money into a life actually lived, and to get the timing of that conversion right.
Dying with a large unspent balance, in his framing, isn’t prudence. It’s a miscalculation. You worked for money you never got round to becoming anything.
The idea that’s stayed with me longest is what he calls the memory dividend. Spend money on an experience at 35 and you don’t just get the experience. You get decades of remembering it, retelling it, compounding it. An experience is an asset that pays out for the rest of your life. Buy it late, and you’ve shortened the payout period.
Which brings us to the part of the book I find genuinely hard to argue with.
Health, not money, is the binding constraint on most of what’s worth doing. There’s a window in which you can ski, dive, walk a long way uphill, chase grandchildren round a garden, and shrug off a long-haul flight without three days of recovery. For a lot of people that window of properly active retirement runs from roughly 65 to 75.¹ Call it ten good years.
Now do the arithmetic on “just one more year” at the office.
If those golden years number ten, then retiring at 66 rather than 65 doesn’t cost you one year out of thirty. It costs you one of the ten you could actually use. That’s 10% of the good stuff, gone, in exchange for a marginal addition to a balance you may never spend. Retire at 67 and you’re down to eight. The maths is unkind, and it gets less kind with every year you defer.
Morgan Housel makes the broader point neatly: the highest dividend money pays is the ability to control your own time. A pot you keep topping up but never draw on is just deferred living. The cruel twist is that the deferral often outlasts the body’s ability to cash it in.
Now the caveat, because I’d be a poor planner without one.
“Die with zero” is a brilliant provocation and a dreadful instruction to follow literally. Hit zero too early and you’ve traded one problem for a far worse one. None of us knows our own date, care costs are real and can be large, and the entire purpose of a plan is to make sure the money lasts at least as long as you do. Perkins knows this too, which is why the book leans on annuities and a deliberate buffer rather than a genuine race to nought.
So the practical version isn’t “spend it all.” It’s softer and more useful. Are you under-living relative to what you’ve built? Is there a healthy decade being quietly traded away for a balance that’s already comfortably ahead of what you’ll need? For many of the people we see, who’ve spent forty years being careful, the harder behavioural shift isn’t saving more. It’s giving themselves permission to spend.
It’s also why gifting while you’re alive, rather than only through your will, can be such a powerful idea. Money handed to children or grandchildren in their thirties, when a deposit or a run of school fees genuinely changes the shape of their lives, tends to do more good than the same sum arriving in their sixties, by which point they’re busy sorting out their own estate. The mechanics (the allowances, the timing, the various reliefs, and how any of it interacts with your own security) are exactly the sort of thing worth taking proper advice on, and they shift with each Finance Act. But the instinct is sound, and it’s Perkins’ instinct too: give with a warm hand, not a cold one.
Hetty Green never could. Whatever she was optimising for, it wasn’t a life.
Most of us aren’t her. But almost all of us sit a little further along her spectrum than we’d care to admit, and the cost of staying there is counted in good years, not pounds.
We help clients in Hook and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent think about precisely this: not only whether the money will last, but whether it’s buying a life while there’s still the health to enjoy it.
That, it turns out, is the harder sum.
¹ The 65–75 window is illustrative, not gospel. Your own depends on genes, luck, and how kind you’ve been to your knees.