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
Yeah, I guess it took a while for it to finally percolate into some sort of action plan. I'm thinking about these things, but they're not resulting in the proper behavior changes yet. I'm still formulating it. You know, everyone says, I want to be rich before I'm 30 or I'm rich before 40. No one's out there saying, I want to be rich before I'm 86.
So intuitively in there, there's something about the utility of money that it's not as valuable to you later on in life.
I think they also see that Warren can't sprint, dunk a basketball, go wakeboarding. There's a lot of other things too in there that enjoyment. And that's what I thought about. And I thought to myself, if for reading this book, I'm spending hours of my life to acquire these experiences. I mean, experiences in the broadest sense, whether it's going on a walk,
or being able to choose to go on a walk or go get a sandwich or buy a shirt or whatever. If I'm exchanging hours in my life and I don't go acquire these experiences, I pretty much wasted hours of my life. So that thought hits and it's like, okay, you don't want to leave anything on the table. In the game of life, when I die, you don't want to leave chips on the table, right?
Like you want to use all your resources before you die. inherent in that is that your choices, your experiences, those experiences are what make you you. Those are the things that fulfill you. And everybody's going to be different. And so... Consequently, having more of it and enjoying more of it will lead to a more fulfilling life.
So that if I'm solving for fulfillment, I don't care about the money. I care about the things I want, the experiences I want to have. If I'm trying to solve for that, one of the things you come quickly to is that you need to use all your resources up before you die. The second thing you come to with the fact that your resources, particularly money, are less valuable to you
When you're older, then you start to think, well, there must be a curve. Because if you're going to end at zero, is it this kind of rectangle shape that just goes down? Is it a 45 degree angle of sleep? Or is there some sort of curve? And so what I like to do to understand certain things that doesn't always work is think of zero and think of infinity.
All right, let's run it all the way back to one, one years old. How useful is money? Not that useful to you. Let's run it all the way forward to 96 on your deathbed. How useful is money to you? Not that useful. So clearly there's like some sort of ramp up of utility and then a decline of utility. And I became obsessed. with finding what that curve was. Because I was like, this is it.
If you're making more money for delayed gratification later in life, you approach infinity. You're actually wasting your time. You should be spending down your assets at a certain point. There's an inflection point where not a number, but a date where your wealth should be going down in order to get the most fulfillment.
No, but it is a standard problem. If you look at JP Morgan or other wealth managers, one of the biggest problems they have is the accumulation, getting people to spend down their assets. They've been saving, they got their money, they hit retirement, and it's like their net worth is going up into their 70s. When's the party? That's what I always ask. I'm like, you just tell me when the party is.
I have conversations with older people or other people. I'm like, listen, it's okay that you're saving. What are you saving for? And when's the party? I just want to know when you're going to use up all your resources.
No, they're not great.
It applies in different ways. So what I've come up with this book is there's three variables, your wealth, your health, and your time. And we're taking those three variables and we're solving for net fulfillment. So we're not solving for maximum wealth. We're not solving even for maximum health, maximum time. We're solving for net fulfillment. I'm saying that's your purpose.
If you're with me, we're solving for net fulfillment. And so one of the things we look is that the total arc of your life, given the resources you have, how do we allocate them? We definitely want to focus on the money. Everybody wants to talk about the money and the resources, but there's decisions that you make even without money.
Whether you go on a walk with your daughters, you play cards with your friends late at night. Do you tuck them in at night or you go hang out with the boys? And so in the book, we talk about the seasons of your life. Certain activities transfer nicely to the next season in your life from 20 to 30 to 30 to 40. And some of them. don't transfer well, they're less enjoyable.
And some of them don't transfer at all. It's impossible. One of the things when the 40-year-old who has $50,000, one of the things I would say is, what's your survival number? Have you calculated that at retirement? Are you surviving retirement or are you in serious negative dire straits?
And once we've calculated that, okay, I need to work and save this much and plus social security, I've had my survival number. Now the rest is for experiences, things I want to do and allocation of my time, how do I allocate it? Is it the cruise at 70? Or is it the ski trip right now? And that's going to be different for every single person. Or is it a shirt or whatever fulfills them?
Or to go play in this chess tournament, pay the entry fee. And for people with zero money, you still have an allocation game to play. You still have your health and your time. You can still decide, hey, I'm going to sit down and watch Friends or I'm going to go hang out at my mom's house and make a meal and spend time with them because I'm only going to see them 20 times before they're gone.
So this type of thinking about allocating your resources at the proper place, getting off autopilot, holds at all wealth levels. It doesn't hold at all health levels because if you have zero health, you have zero. You're done. It's over. But it holds at all wealth levels. So that type of thinking to maximize fulfillment and knowing that you have seasons of your life, that your body decays.
your attitudes change and they pass, that type of thinking in that I need to get things in the right order and use my resources properly, that's going to help you have a more fulfilling life, whether you have zero money or $100 million. There are many people with zero who are having a way more fulfilling life than Warren Buffett, I would say.
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