A Year In On Dying with Zero: A Brutally Honest Account

The good and bad about living your life in a quest to die with zero dollars in your bank account

A year ago we published The Unwritten Guide on How to Die with Zero. It explored the idea of dying with zero dollars in your bank account. Yes, zero. Nada. Nothing.

It sparked many interesting conversations. We’ve recommended the book to countless people. And it changed us - pushing us to do more with our lives.

One year later after living this I wanted to share the failures, the successes, and just how hard it is to change. “Dying with Zero” is one of those concepts that can resonate on a deeply emotional and intellectual level, but be surprisingly nuanced when you look to implement it in your own life. Here is what I’ve learned 1-year in…

Jason's family in Hawaii this past year

The Bad: Irregular Schedules, Friends, and Money

Dying with zero shifted us to travel more, be more generous, and celebrate more. While these all are good things, there are unintended consequences with each.

Irregular Schedules: It’s just hard to keep a regular schedule when you’re trying to live life to the fullest. While we do really well at going to work and school regularly, our evenings and weekends have grown chaotic. For example, when I joined a curling league that introduced a new weekly commitment that didn’t exist before. Also since we are traveling more we’re just less available for dinner or game nights with friends/family. We feel that loss. Being more spontaneous has a lot of benefits. But we’ve realized it also has a tendency to fill your calendar in odd ways that you didn’t predict.

Friends: We have arguably had more friendships bloom while losing depth with existing friendships. While this feels like a prisoner's dilemma (quantity of friends vs. quality of friends), I'll be the first to say we have done this poorly. The busyness of doing more, unless you’re doing more with a few select friends, means you develop different friendships for every experience. This might not be a bad thing, but it feels imbalanced. Looking back I would have planned more experiences with existing friends versus just say yes to more opportunities with new friends.

Money: While obvious, the quest to die with zero dollars in your bank account costs a lot. We have found that it’s easy to book travel relatively cheaply, but on trips when you’re trying to maximize your experiences it’s just more expensive (also note a family of 6 is not a small group). We have also been more charitable, and the more we give the more it feels we find more opportunities to give. We don’t see this as a bad thing though. Surprisingly, though our costs are up year-over-year, we have found new ways to continue to save and invest for our future. The goal isn’t to have zero dollars in your bank account at all times, it’s just not to oversave or starve experiences in the present. Our savings/investments continue to grow, just at a slightly different pace.

The Good: More Experiences (Trips, Curling, & Spontaneous Ice Cream)

One of the core ideas behind dying with zero is to maximize your experiences at the time you can most enjoy them. At 38 years old, with a wife and 4 kids, the experiences I can maximize today have to fit my family.

Trips: We have gone on more trips than ever before. Hawaii, Oregon, Europe, Arizona, and many more. We have had many amazing experiences and grown closer as a family, and one of the joys of traveling is afterwards that experience compounds over time.

Curling: I joined a curling league, with the goal to compete in the 2034 Olympics (read more about my experience here). Candidly if I had not made the decision to live my life to the fullest I wouldn’t have done this. I was open to new opportunities, and now see experiences as a series of tests, and I can choose whether to continue them or not.

Jason with his curling team

Spontaneous Ice Cream: I have never been great at celebrating, but am making a deliberate effort to change that. When my son won his baseball game we went out for ice cream. When a kid loses a tooth - ice cream. When my kids got to 100 rallies in ping pong - ice cream (it took them about a month). Their text to me said:

“We made it to one hundred in Ping Pong!!! We tryed to git to 1O1 but it did not work though.”

It’s obvious we all love ice cream in my house, and I feel like our family culture has shifted to be a bit more celebratory. It’s not just sugar though. We genuinely celebrate even minor successes, and it’s a virtuous cycle. The more we celebrate, the happier we are, and then the more we celebrate.

Change Management: Steering the Ship

Change is hard. In every performance review at work you get a mix of things you are doing well and can improve on. The trouble is if you change everything you can improve on you invariably shift new things into that ‘improvement’ category. For example, if you’re too focused on details, and shift to being a big-picture person, then your next review will say you could improve on focusing on details.

Instead, it’s better to choose just one thing to improve on and do that slowly and deliberately. It’s like steering a ship. You don’t want to be making huge 180 degree turns, but instead making minor corrections by 1 degree to eventually steer you into who you want to become.

Dying with zero feels like that small shift. It’s not that we didn’t travel before (we definitely did!) but now we travel a little more. It’s not that we weren’t charitable before, but now we seek it out. It’s not that we didn’t say yes to things before, but now we find more ways to do that.

Overall I can confidently say I’m happier now than I was a year ago. I won’t give all the credit to dying with zero, but I will give some.

Go live your life to the fullest.

-Jason