On Death
Here’s a strong statement of opinion you won’t see in most “personal finance” literature: I don’t think you can understand the meaning of wealth—or even truly be wealthy—if you haven’t considered your own mortality. You’ve got to contemplate the end.
This doesn’t come naturally to most of us. I don’t like thinking about it myself. If I make a mistake and think about my death right before I go to bed, well damn, I get a specific kind of age-vertigo that keeps me awake for the next 3 hours. If you’re still in your twenties, the idea of death may still seem quite abstract. Death to you might be a thing—like retirement, incontinence, and arthritis—which afflicts some older people out there, but not you. If you’re still in your teens and reading this, well, you just don’t listen do you? I thought I told you in the first chapter to go outside and kick a soccer ball or something.
So what’s the link between our death and being wealthy?
I have a few ideas.
A buddy used to joke that the best way to manage your money, with respect to death, was to spend all your money down to a zero balance so that your check to the undertaker bounces from insufficient funds at the bank. What’s a check, you ask? Forget it. Also, think of the poor undertaker!
I see a couple of serious ideas in that joke, however.
First, dying penniless—as in the joke above—leaves nothing for your heirs. Is that OK? I think so.
At some fundamental level, it’s completely fine. Heirs don’t really need or deserve your money. Trying to figure out whether you have enough to satisfy your own cost of living as you get older is stressful enough. The additional obligation we might feel to provide for heirs seems unnecessary. If there’s money left over, great, but don’t stress about it.
Of course, a spouse who can’t work is different, as would be a child who cannot take care of himself or herself after you’ve passed. Chapter 16’s discussion of term insurance—to cover that risk—should take care of most situations. I acknowledge some families’ situations would require you to worry about taking care of your heirs. But those should be the exceptions, and I don’t think we should act like most of our family members need our money after we’ve died.
More fundamentally, however, I like that joke because it makes an important point. You only need money to cover your lifestyle costs until the day you die. After that, you’re home free! Nobody can charge you for anything anymore. You can’t and won’t take it with you. The score doesn’t matter anymore. You only need it to last until the final day. And if you bounce that last check—heck, it’s not your problem anymore!
Remaining Life Span
When you think about it that way, you can see why the amount of money we need—our ultimate measure of personal wealth—depends on our remaining life span.
If you had one more day to live, how much money do you need? Maybe, none? At least, not much. I mean, there’s a limit to how many expensive double-fudge ice cream sundaes with extra Heath Bar on top I could possibly put away on my last day on earth. Knowing me, I personally would try to push that limit. Still, there is a limit to how much I could possibly spend with just 1 day to go.
Remaining a bit longer with my imaginary scenario of just 1 more day to live, I certainly don’t ever have to a work another day in my life. I probably don’t need to go in to the office. Or, I’d only go in to work if I wanted to do it for some reason other than the pay.
That means my time is my own, to spend as I like. Shouldn’t that sort of be one of the definitions of being wealthy? What else do we need, except the freedom to spend our days as we choose?
Now, what if you could extend that time period from 1 day to a week? Or a year? Isn’t it equally true that if you have this short amount of time to live, and your lifestyle costs were covered, then you’re a wealthy person? It is worth trying to build enough financial cushion to buy back your own time, time you can spend doing only exactly what you choose.
The shorter your remaining time to live—by this thought process—the less money you need to have, to completely buy back your own time. If you don’t need money to live, you don’t need to work for money.
This is what I mean by saying that being wealthy has something to do with being aware of our mortality.
Ideally of course, we reach that “never have to work a day in our life again” stage before our last day on earth. Ideally, we have many years of retirement, in which we work at whatever we like, but we don’t need to actually make any more money.
If we can manage to build and maintain a monthly surplus (Chapter 7), stick to low-interest rate debt only (Chapter 8), start retirement investing early (Chapter 9), buy only as much car as necessary (Chapter 11), own our primary residence for a long period of time (Chapter 12), invest in higher-risk assets in a simple and low-cost way and never sell (Chapters 13 and 14), buy only as much insurance as necessary (Chapter 16), and find work that we actually enjoy (Chapter 17), then a wealthy retirement becomes as inevitable as the sun rising in the east every morning.
And if we are fortunate enough to build our own successful business (Chapter 21), we might just blow up the ceiling on our monetary wealth. Entrepreneurial wealth—compared to wealth derived from working for someone else—offers a much greater possibility of that intergenerational wealth.
Whatever monetary wealth we accumulate, however, that amount will no doubt pale in comparison to the value of nonmonetary things, as we ponder our mortality.
Atul Gawande
Physician Atul Gawande is one of our best thinkers on death and what it means to live a good life even as our health deteriorates. A main lesson of his meditation on dying well, Being Mortal, is that extra end-of-life medical expenditures do not necessarily help us. Our ability to order additional procedures and interventions at the end of our life may in fact get in the way of us thinking about what our real priorities are, with our remaining time. If presented with the choice, do I really prefer 6 more months of life—wracked by pain and horrific medicines—or would a few weeks of relative comfort surrounded by my closest friends and family serve me better? More is not necessarily better when it comes to medical treatment. Less medicine, or at least a thoughtful discussion about priorities and trade-offs, could help most of us die better.
Returning to the subject of death and wealth, the “less is better” theme makes sense to me. I think somewhere in those modest thoughts is a key to “being wealthy.”
I mean, naturally, we know end-of-life medical care drives families into bankruptcy. We may throw tens of thousands of dollars as families, and hundreds of thousands of dollars as a society, at keeping a body alive, possibly well after a high quality of life is long gone. And that is a tough financial choice many, or all of us, have faced or will face. But that isn’t exactly what I’m most concerned with, with respect to the idea of modesty and “less is better.”
Rather, I suspect that if we really think about it—in the light of our inevitable mortality—the key elements that make us feel wealthy at the end of our life have little to do with money.
What is the price of a sunset holding my daughter’s hand, neither of us saying anything but both understanding each other’s thoughts? What would I pay for a single pain-free week, once my body betrayed me and began to hurt all over? Would I spend a king’s ransom to salsa dance with my wife again, had I lost that ability? Yes, I know I would. The relative value of money—versus experiences costing almost nothing—shifts when we think about our own decline and death.
The tart first bite of an apple. Companionship. The soft cheek of an infant. A tragic joke that makes you laugh and cry until your stomach hurts. An overcast afternoon digging in the sand, building a sandcastle that won’t last past high tide. If those don’t make you feel infinitely wealthy, well then, I don’t know what will.
Death Is Guaranteed
Here’s my only 100% personal guarantee in this book. You will die.
No vitamins, hot sulfur soaks, or paleo diets prevent that. You can spend your money any way you like, but aging (if you’re lucky!) and death (guaranteed!) can’t be pushed off indefinitely.
All we can do is try to be—and feel—wealthy in our short interim on the planet.
I recommend staying skeptical of costly placebos which purport to offer the fountain of youth. We foolish humans have been looking for that forever. Don’t hold your breath on a cure for death. Forget the crèmes and potions, pills and powders, diets and fads. Save your money. Bite the apple. Eat the hot fudge sundae. None of our sand castles survive the high tide.