You’ll Spend Way Less in Retirement Than You Think | Bill Perkins Says the Data Is ‘Overwhelming’
Bill Perkins runs a hedge fund, wrote Die With Zero, and lives on a Caribbean island where he watches retired tourists shuffle off cruise ships. On a recent "All the Hacks" episode, he argued that Americans have been optimizing for…
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Bill Perkins runs a hedge fund, wrote Die With Zero, and lives on a Caribbean island where he watches retired tourists shuffle off cruise ships. He recently appeared on the “All the Hacks” podcast to argue that Americans have spent their entire working lives optimizing for the wrong number. He calls the right one “net fulfillment,” which he defines as “the sum of your experiences, your choices. Every moment in your life when you make a decision, those choices, that is what constitutes your life.”
The claim beneath that phrase carries real weight. If Perkins is right that retirement spending falls sharply with age even after accounting for healthcare, then decades of conventional savings advice has been producing people who die with piles of unspent money and years of foregone experiences they cannot buy back. Undersave and you eat cat food at 82. Oversave and you grind through your best decades accumulating wealth you never get around to enjoying. Both are failures worth taking seriously.
The verdict: Perkins is directionally right, with a meaningful caveat about long-term care that most summaries skip entirely.
Net fulfillment vs. net worth
Perkins proposes a fundamental reframe. Rather than maximizing a portfolio balance you can track on a screen, he says the goal should be optimizing the actual asset your money is supposed to purchase: lived experience. He weighs three variables against each other. Wealth accumulates. Health decays. Time is fixed and non-refundable. The mistake most savers make is treating future dollars as though they can substitute for the other two, when a 75-year-old with $2 million and bad knees cannot repurchase the hiking trip he passed on at 45.
His firsthand observation comes from watching cruise ships unload in the Virgin Islands. Many retirees, he noticed, could not do much once they arrived. Their main activity was “going into the shops” because their bodies no longer supported the active experiences they had once pictured for themselves. The glossy version of retirement, he argues, mostly does not happen.
Perkins also recommends what he calls “time bucketing”: dividing life into five-to-ten-year intervals and setting experience goals for each stage. The point is to prioritize meaningful activities while you still have the physical capacity to pursue them, rather than deferring everything to a finish line that arrives later and with less horsepower than expected.
Why you’ll spend less than you think
The macro numbers support the direction of his argument. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that average annual household expenditures reached $78,535 in 2024, up from $72,973 in 2022. The age breakdown is where the story gets interesting. Households headed by someone aged 45 to 54 spent $100,327 on average in 2024, the highest of any age group. Households headed by someone 65 or older spent about $61,432, a drop of more than 38% from that peak. Perkins says the evidence that retirement spending falls, even after adjusting for healthcare, is overwhelming.
The reasons are structural. Mortgages finish, children move out, commuting stops, and the wardrobe budget for a job disappears. Activity itself becomes harder to sustain. Restaurants, travel, concerts, and skiing all require energy you have measurably less of at 78 than at 58. Healthcare costs do rise, and the 38% of retirees who say healthcare costs came in higher than expected are not imagining it. But higher medical bills typically do not fully offset the collapse in discretionary spending on things people no longer physically do.
For context, housing consumed 33.4% of the average household budget in 2024, transportation another 17%, and healthcare 7.9%, per the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. Once a mortgage is paid off, one of those largest anchors lifts substantially, and the freed-up cash rarely flows one-for-one into replacement spending.
How to actually use the money
The variable that determines whether Perkins’s advice helps or hurts you is long-term care exposure. If your family history and health suggest a real probability of five or more years in memory care, the tail cost is serious. According to CareScout’s 2025 Cost of Care Survey, a semi-private room in a skilled nursing facility runs about $114,975 per year nationally ($315 per day), while memory care facilities nationally carry a median cost of around $7,000 to $7,300 per month. Undersaving against that specific risk is genuinely dangerous.
If the long-term care scenario does not apply to your situation, holding an extra $500,000 in reserve “just in case” is buying insurance against an unlikely outcome, at the price of experiences you could still be having. That is Perkins’s actual argument: match the hedge to the actual probability, then deploy the rest toward life while you can still enjoy it.
One extension of this thinking is giving earlier rather than waiting to leave an inheritance. Perkins notes that adult children typically need financial support in their 20s and 30s, when they are buying first homes or starting families, not decades later when wealth finally transfers. Fidelity reported a 23% increase in donor-advised fund grants in 2025, a signal that more retirees are acting on this idea in real time. For families looking to start, the IRS allows up to $19,000 in annual gifts per recipient in 2026 without triggering gift tax.
Four practical moves map onto the framework:
- Run your actual retirement number using the SSA benefit estimator and a withdrawal-rate calculator, then compare it against what you already have. Many diligent savers discover they crossed the finish line years ago.
- Price long-term care insurance or set aside a specific dollar bucket for it, so the rest of your savings is not implicitly held hostage to that single risk.
- Rank the experiences that require health, not just money. Move the ones that need working knees into your 50s and 60s, not your 80s.
- Track annual spending by category for two years so you know your real burn rate. Most people significantly overestimate what they will need once they stop working.
Perkins’s own framing is that he wants to “get more out of this one ride called life” rather than die with money unspent. You do not have to embrace the whole philosophy to recognize the underlying point: money that never gets deployed toward a life is just inventory.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect CareScout’s 2025 Cost of Care Survey, which puts the national median for skilled nursing semi-private rooms at $114,975 per year and memory care at around $7,000 to $7,300 per month, replacing earlier estimates. It also adds Perkins’s “time bucketing” planning concept, Fidelity’s reported 23% increase in donor-advised fund grants in 2025, and the IRS’s $19,000 annual gift exclusion for 2026.
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Omor Ibne Ehsan is a writer at 24/7 Wall St. He is a self-taught investor with a focus on growth, cyclical, and dividend equities that have strong fundamentals, value, and long-term potential. He also has an interest in high-risk, high-reward investments such as penny stocks.
