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. 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 accounting for 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. Undersave and you eat cat food at 82. Oversave and you spend your best decades earning money you never get around to enjoying. Both are failures worth taking seriously.
The verdict here is that Perkins is directionally right, with a real caveat about long-term care that most summaries skip.
Net fulfillment vs. net worth
Perkins’s frame is a swap. Instead of maximizing a portfolio balance you can see on a screen, you optimize the actual asset your money is supposed to purchase: 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 glossy 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. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that average annual household expenditures reached $78,535 in 2024, up from $72,973 in 2022. But the age breakdown tells the real story. 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.
Big fixed costs fall off first. Mortgages finish, kids move out, commuting stops, and the wardrobe budget for a job disappears. Then activity itself becomes harder 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 typically do not fully offset the collapse in discretionary spending on things you no longer physically do.
For context, housing alone consumed 33.4% of the average household budget in 2024, with healthcare taking another 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 other categories.
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 serious probability of five or more years in memory care, the tail cost is enormous: memory care nationally runs $6,500 to $8,500 per month in 2025, and a semi-private room in a skilled nursing facility costs about $112,420 per year, according to the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program’s 2024 Cost of Care Survey. Undersaving against that risk is genuinely dangerous.
If the long-term care risk does not apply to your situation, holding an extra $500,000 “just in case” is buying insurance against an unlikely outcome, at the price of experiences you could still have. That is Perkins’s actual point: match the hedge to the actual probability, then deploy the rest toward life while you can enjoy it.
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 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.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to add 2024 BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey figures showing the 45-to-54 age cohort spends $100,327 annually versus $61,432 for households 65 and older, and to include 2025 long-term care cost data from the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program showing memory care runs $6,500 to $8,500 per month and skilled nursing facility semi-private rooms cost about $112,420 per year.
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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 and cyclical stocks that have strong fundamentals, value, and long-term potential. He also has an interest in high-risk, high-reward investments such as cryptocurrencies and penny stocks.
