Bill Perkins
speaker
1,205 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5 Jun
Bill Perkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He's like right next to me, even though he's not at the same firm. We're all crowded into one area. And Jason's like, I'm going to go backpacking for you for a couple months. I'm like, what? How are you going to do that? Well, I'm going to borrow money from this guy who was a loan shark. And I'm like, wait, what? You're going to borrow money from this guy?
and you're going to go backpacking in Europe. I'm like, this is insane. This is insanity. My head is about to explode. I'm like, you're going to miss out. And what if they hire another screen clerk and your job's not there when you come back? And how are you going to pay this guy back if you don't pay him back? This is not like, oh, penalties and interest. This is like knees and ankles.
And so I just didn't get it. That experience, I wasn't thinking about like Die With Zero and certain experiences belong in a certain period of your life, et cetera. I was just ultimately on this autopilot of trying to be successful and make money at that time in my life. And Jason was like, I'm going backpacking. So he went, I stayed, he came back, had a screen clerking job.
Different firm or same firm? Same firm. Wasn't that much noticeable different. I moved up a little bit, but it wasn't that noticeable different, but he came back richer and He came back with stories and experiences and romance and lifelong friends. In the beginning, I was kind of, oh, wow, maybe I missed out. Maybe I could have jumped in for a week, that type of thing.
And as time went on, I really, really regretted not joining him on that trip. When it finally came time where like, I'm going to go Europe. I'm going to have this backpacking experience. I was too bougie. I had money. I wasn't going to go stay at youth hostels. I wasn't going to capture these trains. I was going to have an experience, but a different experience.
The type of experience he had was for that time in your life. And the type of experience, even though it was wonderful, it was not as rich as his experience. because the time had passed me by. It's one of my big, big, big regrets in life.
It was slowly over time. Even when I got to the exchange, I was in this hurry to get rich. And the reason why I was in a hurry, because I had this bias, I had this belief. I was like, yeah, there's rich guys here, but they're old. What can they possibly do with the money? I'm young. I'm 21. I'm ageist. I can't imagine The use of a million dollars when you're 40, right?
Like, what are you gonna do, buy a nicer car to drive your kids around? It just seems like loss on them. They don't get to do fun things. Now, I was wrong about that, But I was right about the utility of money over time. And I also read this book at this time called Your Money or Your Life that kind of transformed my understanding of what money is.
It's a very detailed book that has these exercises that has you look at how you spend your hours from going to work, getting ready for work, the things you spend on work, and really figuring out what your true hourly wage is. After tax, this is what an hour of your time, of your life is worth.
and then it has you not think of everything in money but in time so instead of going to the movies and say it cost me ten dollars it's like that cost me one hour and 15 minutes of my time to go to this movie to buy this shirt it cost me three hours of my time and so you get this idea that i'm exchanging my life for certain things.
The experience of buying a shirt, going to the movie, going on a trip. And that hit me hard. And where were you at this point? This is before you went to Houston? Before I went to Houston. That hit me hard. And that's what really turned me into like, I'm going to save. The two things I got out of it is I won a lot of money. And I'm going to become this very frugal person.
There's this movement called FIRE, which that book is kind of like the Bible, the precursor to the FIRE movement, which is financial independence, retire early. And I was kind of like an early FIRE guy. I'm going to save my way to riches, right? I'm going to save and then retire early. And sorry, did you know what you wanted to do when you retired? I went on to another autopilot.
I went on another version of autopilot. I read a book. I got these concepts out of it. And I was like, this is what I'm going to do. I didn't think about the big picture of everything. But certain concepts were coming to me. I exchange hours of my life for money, and then that money is used for the things I want.
Let's take the abstract of money out of it and look at what hours of my life are being exchanged for. That was a great concept to sink in very viscerally.
Not in a way that you're properly analyzing it, but in more of an intuitive way. Because when you start to think about things in time, it's like, wait a minute, three hours for a shirt? versus going here, having a sandwich and hanging out with my friends or whatever it is, your values start to, you really get in touch with your values because it's not an abstract land.
It's like when you're in a casino and they give you chips, it's one of the greatest things to do is give you chips. It's not money, you're tipping $25, you're throwing, let it all ride because it's so abstracted from money. So it's an abstraction on an abstraction. By removing that abstraction, you get closer to your values.
So when you start thinking about things in terms of hours of your life and you have finite hours, you start to really get closer to your values. You can still be on autopilot, but you're closer. And so things like this were happening. And at that time, at the exchange... Like most people, I had like, what is it all for? Like, what do I want? You know, I'm here to get rich, but why?
No, I'm generally having it with myself and reading books. But I'm still asking myself, but why? What do I want? And I'm remembering conversations that maybe I've had throughout my life. There was a college football player named Dwight Sistrunk and I was trying to do engineering and we were debating something.
He's like, listen, you might want to picket fence and a wife and something like that and that life. I don't want that life. I don't want that cookie cutter life. That's fine for you, but that's not my path. I thought about it and I was like, do I really want that? you know, certain things that he said that he didn't want that I was actually working for, you know, thinking that this was my path.
I actually realized, no, I don't want that. I'm pretty hardheaded. It takes a while for these things to seep in.
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