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 \u201cAll the Hacks\u201d episode, he argued that Americans have been optimizing for the wrong number their entire working lives. \u201cNet fulfillment,\u201d he calls it, which he defines as \u201cthe sum of your experiences, your choices. Every moment in your life when you make a decision, those choices, that is what constitutes your life.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The verdict here is that Perkins is directionally right, with a real caveat about long-term care that most feed-friendly summaries skip.<\/p>\n
Net fulfillment vs. net worth<\/p>\n
Perkins\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cgoing into the shops\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Why you\u2019ll spend less than you think<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n How to actually use the money<\/p>\n The variable that decides whether Perkins\u2019s 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 \u201cjust in case\u201d is buying insurance against a risk you may not face, at the price of trips you can still take.<\/p>\n Four practical moves that map onto the framework.<\/p>\n