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 the wrong number their entire working lives. “Net fulfillment,” he calls it, 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 underneath that phrase is more provocative than it sounds. If Perkins is right that retirement spending falls sharply with age even after healthcare, the standard advice to save until it hurts is systematically producing people who die with piles of unspent money and years of foregone experiences they cannot buy back. That is the stake. Undersave and you eat cat food at 82. Oversave and you spend your best decades earning money you never get around to enjoying.
The verdict here is that Perkins is directionally right, with a real caveat about long-term care that most feed-friendly summaries skip.
Net fulfillment vs. net worth
Perkins’s frame is a swap. Instead of maximizing a portfolio balance you see on a screen, you optimize the actual asset your money is supposed to purchase, which is lived experience. He weighs three variables, wealth, health, and time. Wealth accumulates. Health decays. Time is fixed and non-refundable. The mistake most savers make is treating future dollars as if they can substitute for the other two, when in practice a 75-year-old with $2 million and bad knees cannot repurchase the hiking trip he skipped at 45.
His firsthand observation comes from watching cruise ships unload in the Virgin Islands. A lot of 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. The Carnival commercial version of retirement, he says, mostly does not happen.
Why you’ll spend less than you think
Macro numbers support the direction of his argument. Average annual expenditures per U.S. household ran about $78,535 in 2024, up from $72,973 in 2022, and spending peaks in the 45-to-54 age band in most BLS breakouts before declining meaningfully through the 65-and-older cohorts. Perkins says the evidence that retirement spending falls, even after adjusting for healthcare, is overwhelming.
Big fixed costs fall off first. Mortgages finish, kids move out, commuting stops, and the wardrobe budget for a job disappears. Then activity itself gets more expensive to sustain. Restaurants, travel, concerts, and skiing all require energy you have less of at 78 than at 58. Healthcare does rise, and the 38% of retirees who say healthcare costs came in higher than expected are not imagining it. But higher healthcare bills usually do not fully offset the collapse in discretionary spending on things you no longer physically do.
Meanwhile, services already dominate consumption. Housing and healthcare together ran roughly 35% of total personal consumption in May 2026, and services overall were 69%. Once a house is owned outright, one of those anchors gets much lighter.
How to actually use the money
The variable that decides whether Perkins’s advice helps or hurts you is long-term care exposure. If your family history and health suggest a high probability of five years in memory care, the tail cost is enormous and undersaving is genuinely dangerous. If it does not, holding an extra $500,000 “just in case” is buying insurance against a risk you may not face, at the price of trips you can still take.
Four practical moves that 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 wall off 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 wildly overestimate what they will need in retirement.
Perkins’s own summary 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 buy the whole philosophy to notice the point. Money that never gets deployed toward a life is just inventory.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Top Gaining Stocks
Top Losing Stocks