Wealth Versus Life—or How to Die with Zero
Photo by Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash
Anyone who’s worked for a living knows the gig. Working for a living means you strive for a shelter of sorts, regular meals, perhaps a handful of good friends on Sunday to watch the Superbowl and help with the chicken wings. Wealth, what’s that? Admittedly having money is better than not, but when you confuse the means with the end, that might be a sign.
Indeed, people are all about different pursuits, and some go for the bucks, the dineros and shekels—like the silver will keep them warm. Accumulate enough, what it guarantees—about the only thing—is a nicer coffin and a big spray, recalling Don Henley’s line about luggage racks being absent on hearses.
The book review I was reading Sunday morning instead of writing—the purported morning raison d’être other than coffee—was about an energy trader named Bill Perkins and how he ‘discovered’ living went beyond diving for dollars so he wrote a book, Die with Zero.
Was it Warren Buffett who said he refused to pass on his fortune to his children? After the first several billion in assets, one simply becomes an economic statistic, going back to Henley.
Goals, when you step back and study them, are phantoms, impossibly intangible, and the ones you actually achieve often seem the least satisfying—like cotton candy being honest. The perennial itch.
The book’s subtitle says it all: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life. “Well, isn’t that special?” the church lady said. Perkins strikes me as an all too typical social media guru, absorbing too much oxygen.
His book has its own website wherein it brags about being the “#1 New Release in the Budgeting & Money Management Books. The Most Talked About Book in Personal Finance.” And reviews were stacked up on one helpful site after another. The Goodreads site included:
“Die with Zero presents a startling new and provocative philosophy as well as practical guide on how to get the most out of your money—and out of your life. It’s intended for those who place lifelong memorable experiences far ahead of simply making and accumulating money for one’s so-called Golden Years.” from the Goodreads review.
Make that eagle scream, baby—not exactly Stoicism. Besides, if you’re already chasing memories instead of money, do you really need the book? Hmm? Contrariwise, working the checkout at Walmart isn’t likely to provide an income stream needing counseling to spend the weekly paycheck. Perhaps if your net worth is greater than a third world country…
And the reviewer I came across on Medium, seems he drank the entire kool-aid pitcher.
“Essentially, the book is about maximizing your life experiences, which means balancing time, money, and health, throughout your lifespan. Sometimes, it absolutely makes sense to trade time for money, but ruining your health for the sake of money is usually a horrible investment!”
from Net Worth>Net Wealth by Matt Karamazov
OK, not crazy crazy, just stating the obvious. I was surprised this would be important enough to publish. So I prayed to the great and all-knowing Google who forthwith (.002 seconds later) returned the following:
“William O. Perkins III is an American hedge fund manager, film producer and high stakes poker player from Houston, Texas. Perkins focuses on venture capital and energy markets. He founded Small Ventures USA, L.P in 1997 and later joined Centaurus Energy in 2002. He currently manages Houston-based energy hedge fund, Skylar Capital.
“Perkins grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey the son of football player and politician Bill Perkins and graduated from St. Peter's Preparatory School in 1986. In 2016, he contributed $1.5 million towards the construction of the William O. Perkins III '86 Athletic Center at his alma mater.”
from Wikipedia article on William O. Perkins III
If a high stakes poker player is your lode stone, I can see how it fits.
“As Perkins explains in the book, for heads of households between the ages of 70 and 74… the median net worth is $225,390. One’s seventies, for many people, is sadly too late to enjoy many of life’s most fulfilling experiences.”
from Net Worth>Net Wealth by Matt Karamazov
That bit about one’s 70s sounds personal, Matt? Life’s more fulfilling experiences, indeed. Coming from a writer who obviously hasn’t reached thirty—mentally or otherwise—though one ought never judge.
…
I’d put it another way: die with something to pass down. Pass down your writing, for example. Box after box of old manuscripts they’ll need to haul down from the attic. Don’t leave them wondering. Or bequeath the family manse—there’s a nice touch. Write a codicil to the old will requiring it remain in the family for all time. They’ll love you for it.
If it’s cash, it doesn’t have to be much. My mother left her three grown children with children of their own something like $60K, which plumb amazed me—how on earth had she saved anything on a salary of less than $6,000 a year? Obviously not day trading.
…
Die with zero? I suppose that’s right, though it was probably a more shocking revelation for an energy trader the son of a politician coming from private school than a boy from rural South Carolina where you were lucky to make it past high school.
Sounds too judgmental? Could be, though what can you say for someone whose wealth comes from betting on markets sliding one way and you’re hoping they’re going the other? I understand the short-selling argument, that speculators clean up after failing enterprises, but it doesn’t move me. Sharks help clean up the ocean, too, but I’m not feeling the love for them either. Tolerance is about all I can muster.
Counting your stack of chips and chasing after more of them year after year strikes me as a vacuous way to live, even if you celebrate your winnings with Tahitian vacations. At least Bill Gates stole an operating system for the masses, and Bezos made it easy to distribute over-inflated life lessons and Chinese come-alongs. I suspect Mother Teresa would say ‘give it away,’ and for certain my sweet mother would say ‘there ought to be a lot more to a life.’
Being poor has its own cliché, enjoying the simple day to day pleasures—like a double whooper and fries on holidays—because it’s all you can afford.
Assuming you’ve finally scraped enough to tide you over, you might take up philosophy—or writing. Galloping into the homestretch so to speak, you could be going on about what happened, so your son understands you a bit better, as he’s packing you off with all your boxes to the nursing home. It could be a thing.
…
Walking the dog yesterday, we saw another side of the game.
Our neighborhood is an obscure nest of rambling narrow streets for outsiders to get lost in. No obvious thru-streets. Early in the 1950s, several street easements that might have joined us to the rest of Northern Virginia were conveniently closed. So it’s a quiet enclave with no sidewalks and few street lights. And a ton of trees either side of the twisting, hilly byways, so that one street looks much like another. You can spot the lost drivers; the car slows at each side street, while the driver ponders whether to try it.
“Can you tell me how to get back to Columbia Pike?” is a common inquiry.
Even Layla the husky can tell when they’re lost. Yesterday, she was doing her nose-down investigation of a leaf pile, catching up on neighborhood gossip, when we heard this car coming too fast around the corner. Shortly, this blue econo box was moving on us way faster than it should have been. I gave him the old universal hi sign, and he swerved, braked a bit before rolling straight through the stop sign behind us and was gone again.
What he was trying to accomplish, hurrying to get lost on that particular loop, caught our attention as well as the white scrapes along the side of the car, like it’d had a big itch needing to be scratched. On streets with no sidewalks, speeders are a hazard, and we have a share of them, but at least he moved over passing us, so he wasn’t the worst I’ve encountered.
Layla had resumed her inspection of the leaf pile when the first police car turned the same corner ahead of us. The Fairfax County policeman pulled up, lowered his window and asked if a small blue car had passed us. “Just now. He turned left.” The policeman was studying his GPS screen and nodding, then he roared off.
Looked like our buddy in the blue car was getting a ticket, D said.
A minute later, another police car turned onto the same side street, no siren and moving briskly. By the time we’d reached the main street—the only way in and out of the neighborhood—a third squad car was coming at us, then a fourth plus an unmarked car and no one was smiling.
“All for speeding? Must be a slow day for the police.”
Our enclave backs up to Culmore, the landing spot for every immigrant wave the DC area has ever seen. It’s a sprawling apartment complex that’s been there on Leesburg Pike since the 1950s, one that the Fairfax police keep a close eye on—mainly fights after too many beers and bad love matches, but also more boisterous activities involving the MS-13 gang, so perhaps the helicopters circling over Culmore Friday nights serve as deterrence. But rarely does anything happen in our more immediate ‘hood other than night anglers drowning their bate in the lake.
Returned to the house and my computer, the list serve was lighting up with “What’s going on?” and “Did you see all eight of those squad cars go by?” Some folks have nothing better to do than to count passing police cars. I resumed writing and thought no more about it.
The following morning, all was revealed. A carjacking begun miles away in Springfield ended with a car chase through the neighborhood. His was not the best choice of getaway routes. More to the point, it wasn’t a great career path. White, twenties and driving too fast was all we had witnessed. But the Nest camera toward the end of the cul-de-sac caught the final action, first the little blue car briskly passing the camera, knowingly or not heading for a dead end, followed by squad car after squad car, the last one blocking the road. A good friend of our—our very own dog whisperer—lives on that cul-de-sac.
The dénouement was caught off stage by the camera; not far off an excited police officer was screaming, “Get out of the car! Get out of the car!” Adrenalin has to be as bad an occupational hazard as cheap hamburgers and fries. “You want ketchup with them fries, officer?”
…
Life hands out choices like chocolates, as Tom Hanks said. Even when it feels like being channeled down cul-de-sacs and such, so we juke left when we ought to have taken that right to freedom. Some get do-overs and recover. Others spend lifetimes repeating bad decisions, one after another.
Others may miss what an energy trader searching for the deals will provide himself—a sweet income, true that. And if he wakes up one morning and recollects something his mother taught him when he was a kid and realizes the candle’s already half burned, and if he gets busy doing something to help ease his soul, well god bless. Being saved is what the religious folks say that is, and it can happen.
I don’t know if the carjacker who’s now sitting in a cell in the Fairfax Adult Detention Center is having one of those epiphanies; here’s hoping he is. He was kind enough not to hit us on his flight through the ‘hood. And he was, at one point, someone’s baby boy.
Tomorrow’s the Superbowl, when too much is gambling on too small an outcome. One team will receive chunky-sized diamond rings and other gets to go home first class wearing the scars. We have all our crazy ways to pass the time. Tonight, the moon is staring at me. Tic toc and all those other nursery rhymes I keep hearing, and it keeps silently staring, that old cratered moon. Cold as it is here tonight, up there it must be beyond freezing.