Die With Zero: the spend-to-zero strategy

What "Die With Zero" actually means

Die With Zero, from Bill Perkins' 2020 book, argues that the purpose of money is to fund a life, not to grow a number. The provocative version: the ideal final balance is zero, because every unspent dollar is an experience you could have had and didn't.

Your ability to enjoy money changes with age: a trip at 55 is not the same trip at 85, and some experiences close off entirely as health declines. Perkins calls the return on well-timed spending a "memory dividend," the enjoyment you keep drawing from a memory for the rest of your life. And most diligent savers, trained over 40 years to accumulate, overshoot badly, dying with far more than they meant to leave.

For a retiree it is not an accumulation strategy but a drawdown one: given what you have, how fast can you responsibly spend it so it runs out at roughly the same time you do? The philosophy sets the target; hitting it is a math problem, which is why a year-by-year projection is the right tool.

Why the 4% rule leaves millions unspent

The 4% rule was never designed to spend your money efficiently. It was designed so that a portfolio survives a worst-case 30-year window without going to zero. In any market that is not the worst case, which is almost all of them, it leaves a large balance behind.

Consider a single retiree, age 65, with $1,000,000 across a 401(k), brokerage, and Roth, plus $24,000 of Social Security at 67. Run the classic 4% rule, $40,000 a year adjusted for inflation, through the Drawdown Arc engine with taxes and 6% growth, and the portfolio doesn't shrink. It grows:

Read the left column. The 4% retiree dies at 90 with $2.74 million never spent, nearly three times what they started with, not a margin they chose but the byproduct of a rule tuned for the worst case and run in an ordinary one. To a Die With Zero thinker, that $2.74M isn't a legacy. It's unlived life.

The right column is the same person spending to zero: $72,000 a year, about 80% more, with the balance landing at zero at 90. Same savings, same market, wildly different life. The two rules answer different questions, and it's worth being honest about which one you're asking. For how far the 4% rule can bend, see does the 4% rule still work.

Your spend-to-zero number

Your "die with zero number" is the annual spending that runs your portfolio down to roughly zero by your target age. Because it aims at depletion, not perpetual survival, it is a far higher rate than the 4% rule: $72,000 on $1,000,000 is a starting withdrawal rate north of 7%.

Three things move your number. The age to which you plan sets how many years the money must stretch. Your guaranteed income, Social Security and any pension, is the floor you land on once the portfolio is gone, so the larger it is, the harder you can draw the portfolio down. Finally, your assumed rate of return decides how much the balance keeps earning while you spend it. Shift any one and the number swings, which is why a rule of thumb can't pin it down but a year-by-year projection can. See how long will my savings last for the mechanics of a declining balance.

The catch: you don't know your last day

Spending to zero by a specific age only works if you know that age. You don't. Your own death date is the load-bearing assumption behind any spend-to-zero plan, the one input everything else rests on, and it is the one input you can never actually know.

Watch the $72,000 plan if the retiree outlives the age 90 they planned for. The portfolio hits zero at 90 by design, so reaching 95 means five years with it already gone, living on Social Security's roughly $24,000 alone, a brutal 65% income cut at the most fragile stage of life.

The buffer has a cost: every year you plan for and don't use converts back into the unspent balance Die With Zero set out to eliminate. You can't have both a zero balance and a guarantee against outliving your money; the goals are in direct tension. A projection gives you the honest exchange rate between them, so you can pick a point on the spectrum with open eyes. A bad early market makes the tradeoff sharper still; see sequence of returns risk.

How to model spend-to-zero

You don't need a special "die with zero calculator." Any honest year-by-year drawdown model does it, because spending to zero is just the drawdown problem run at a higher spend. The method:

1. Enter your real accounts and income floor. Balances by tax type, plus Social Security and any pension at their claim ages. Guaranteed income is what you keep when the portfolio is gone, so it anchors everything.
2. Set a planning age with a buffer. Use something well past your life expectancy, age 95 or later, so a long life doesn't break the plan.
3. Raise spending until the balance lands near zero at that age. Nudge spending up and watch the ending balance fall; when it reaches roughly zero at your target age, that spend is your number.
4. Read the withdrawal rate and sanity-check it. Well above 4% is expected; what matters is whether the arc glides down smoothly or falls off a cliff after a bad early decade.

Two engine details matter. First, because the calculator applies federal tax, state tax, and required minimum distributions year by year, the number it reports is money you can actually spend, not a pre-tax figure you'd have to trim for taxes yourself. Second, the order you draw accounts in changes the tax you pay, and so how much is left to spend, which makes it part of the answer, not a detail.

Guaranteed income is the quiet hero here, which is why when you claim Social Security matters more than under a conservative rule: a larger lifetime floor is what makes it safe to run the portfolio down hard, because the floor still stands after the portfolio is spent. Spend-to-zero is the aggressive end of a range of withdrawal strategies; to see how it lines up against the more conservative ones, see withdrawal strategies compared.

Where Die With Zero breaks down

The philosophy is a useful corrective to chronic under-spending. Taken literally, it has real failure modes, and the honest version of the idea plans around them rather than pretending they don't exist.

• Longevity is unknowable. Spending to zero at your life expectancy means a coin-flip chance of outliving the money.
• Long-term care is the elephant. A few years in a nursing home can run several hundred thousand dollars, and it tends to arrive exactly when a spend-to-zero plan wants the balance lowest. A literal zero leaves nothing for it.
• Sequence risk is unforgiving. A high withdrawal rate is far more exposed to a bad first decade: the same $72,000 that glides to zero in a 6% world can deplete years early after a rough start. That exposure is why spend-to-zero needs a return buffer, planning on lower returns than you expect, not just a longevity one.
• It assumes zero heirs and zero cushion. Plenty of people want to leave something to children or charity, or just sleep better with a reserve. That's a legitimate preference, not a failure of discipline.
• Spending down is psychologically brutal. Four decades of saving don't reverse on command; many who could spend far more can't bring themselves to watch the balance fall, which is the human problem Die With Zero is really trying to solve.

None of this makes Die With Zero wrong. It just means you shouldn't take the target literally. The usable version is directional: most careful savers should spend meaningfully more, and earlier, than a survival-tuned rule suggests, while keeping a longevity buffer, a care reserve, and an income floor. Modeling turns that into a number, the gap between what you're spending now and what your plan could safely support, so you can choose how much of it to close.

Model your own number

The example here uses one specific retiree. Your accounts, income floor, growth assumptions, and planning age all move the answer. To find your own number, run it with your real inputs and raise spending until the balance glides to zero at an age you're comfortable planning to.

The button below opens the calculator pre-loaded with this guide's spend-to-zero scenario, $72,000 a year gliding to zero by 90. Adjust the numbers to your situation, and push the planning age out to give yourself a buffer.