Wealth of Happiness

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Die with Zero by Bill Perkins – 7/10

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Chapter 1: Optimize Your Life

  • Rule 1: Maximize your positive life experiences.
  • The goal is to choose your experiences deliberatively and purposefully rather than live on autopilot.
  • To increase your overall life fulfillment, it’s important to have each experience at the right age.
  • Maximizing your fulfillment from experiences – by planning how you will spend your time and money to achieve the biggest peaks you can with the resources you have – is how to maximize your life.
  • Think in terms of life energy – all the hours that you’re alive to do things – and whenever you work, you spend some of that finite life energy (e.g., if you earn $8 an hour, spending $8 means spending an hour of life energy; determine what is your hourly rate).
  • Recommendation: Start actively thinking about the life experiences you’d like to have, and the number of times you’d like to have them.

Chapter 2: Invest in Experiences

  • Rule 2: Start investing in experiences early.
  • Your life is the sum of your experiences.  Be proactive about the journey you want to have before death.
  • Memory dividend – experiences actually gain value over time. Every time you remember the original experience, you get an additional experience from mentally and emotionally reliving the original experience.  
    • Buying an experience doesn’t just buy you the experience itself – it also buys you the sum of all the dividends that experience will bring for the rest of your life.
    • Similar to financial savings, memories can and will compound throughout the years.
  • Earning and earning while forgetting that your whole point in earning money is to be able to spend it on experiences that make your life what it is.
  • It pays early to invest early.  The earlier you start investing, the more time you have to reap your memory dividends.
  • Recommendations: Plan out those experiences now and who you’d like to experience them with.  How can you enhance those memory dividends (more photos)? 

Chapter 3: Why Die with Zero

  • Rule 3: Aim to die with zero.
  • Why? A waste of life energy if you die with zero (e.g., savings of $130K at an hourly rate of $19.56 = 6,646 hours worked that someone never got to spend or two and a half years of working for free).
  • If you don’t die with zero, you are not getting maximum enjoyment from your money.
  • In a 2018 study from the Employee Benefits Research Institute, many people rarely use their retirement savings (and 1/3rd of retirees actually increased their assets in retirement).  
  • Why? Spending decreases as you age because of slow-go and no-go phases of retirement.
  • Retirement is in three phases: go-go years, slow-go years, and no-go years.
    • Go-go – have the health and energy to pursue those experiences.Slow-go – begin in your seventies as progress on crossing items off your bucket list slows as your health declines.
    • No-go – no energy to travel (the eighties and beyond).
  • It is much smarter to spend your healthcare money on the front end (to maintain your health and try to prevent disease) than to spend it at the end.
  • Long term care insurance – solution to minimizing health care expenses when you get older.

Chapter 4: How to Spend Your Money (Without Actually Hitting Zero Before You Die)

  • Rule 4: Use all available tools to help you die with zero.
  • Leverage tools to estimate when you will die: www.longevityillustrator.org or www.livingto100.com
  • Annuities can be used as an insurance for protecting you against the risk of dying too old (outliving your savings).  Life insurance is to protect your survivors against the risk that you’ll die too young.
  • We are solving for your total life enjoyment (not maximizing your wealth). 
    • Money is just a means to an end: having money helps you to achieve the more important goal of enjoying your life.
  • Make maximizing total life enjoyment your mantra to guide every decision.
  • Many people are willing to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to prolong life for just a few more weeks.  They gave up years of their life while healthy and vibrant to buy a few extra weeks of life when they are sick and immobile (irrational!).
  • Final Countdown – seeing your expected death date can give a much-needed urgency to one’s life.

Chapter 5: What About the Kids?

  • Rule 5: Give money to your children or to charity when it has the most impact.
  • Split money in two different buckets: one for kids and one for you:
    • Give your children whatever you have allocated for them before you die.  
    • Spend all your money.
  • Peak utility of money – the time when it can bring optimal usefulness or enjoyment – occurs at age 30, then at age 30 every dollar buys you one dollar’s worth of enjoyment.  By 50, that enjoyment goes down.   
  • The ideal age to gift money to kids is the 26-35 age range – old enough to be trusted with money, yet young enough to fully enjoy its benefits.
  • If your goal is to maximize what you get out of your life, it makes sense to want to maximize what your kids get out of their lives too. 
  • What kinds of experiences do you want your kids to have with you? Think of the memory dividends for you and for your kids.
  • Of all the experiences you are trying to bequeath to your child, one of those experiences is time with you.
  • Studies have shown that adults with higher parental affection have lower levels of depression and better health.
  • If you are earning money but not having experiences with your kids, you are actually depriving your kids. And yourself.  

Chapter 6: Balance Your Life

  • Rule 6: Don’t live your life on autopilot.
  • Need to balance risk/reward – strike the right balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.
  • A person’s ability to extract enjoyment from their money begins to decline with age.
  • Three basics people need to have to get the most out of their life: health, free time, and money.  The problem is that these things rarely all come together at once.
  • Nothing has a greater effect on your ability to enjoy experiences – at any age – than your health.
    • Health is a lot more valuable than money because no amount can ever make up for very poor health.
    • Spend money to keep/improve your health (eating right, exercising)
  • People who spend money on time-saving purchases experience greater life satisfaction, regardless of their income.
    • If you pay to get out of tasks you don’t enjoy, you are simultaneously reducing the number of negative life experiences and increasing the number of positive life experiences (for which you now have more time).
  • Personal interest rate – the amount someone should pay you to delay an experience (e.g. work the summer for x or go to Mexico)
    • The older you get, the less willing you should be to delay an experience, even if someone pays you a lot of money.
  • Recommendations: what life experiences can you have now that you might not be able to have later?  How can you improve your health and eating habits (Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman)?

Chapter 7: Start to Time-Bucket Your Life

  • Rule 7: Think of your life as distinct seasons.
  • Top regrets people have as they are on their death bed:
    • Not pursuing their dreams
    • “I wish I had not worked so hard.”
  • Being aware that your time is limited can clearly motivate you to make the most of the time you do have. (e.g. when we’re on vacation, we make a full and conscious effort to treat our time as the scarce resource that it is.  When we’re back home, we take our hometown’s daily routine and attractions for granted).
  • Time Buckets – Draw a timeline of your life from now to the grave, then divide it into intervals of five or ten years.
    • Put the most physically demanding activities on the left side of the timeline (younger).
    • Time buckets are proactive and let you plan your life; a bucket list, on the other hand, is a much more reactive effort in a sudden race against time.

Chapter 8: Know Your Peak

  • Rule 8: Know when to stop growing your wealth.
  • Find your peak point – the point in your life when your net worth is the highest it will ever be so you can start spending it down on experiences while you can still extract a lot of enjoyment from those experiences.
  • Determine worst case scenario – the amount of money you need to have saved up just to survive without any income.
    • Survival threshold = 0.7 x (cost to live one year) x years left to live)
    • 0.7 = amount to reduce threshold after considering investment returns above inflation
  • The peak should be a date not a number since experiences consider money, health, and free time.
    • If you are building more money by working, you are losing even more of something at least as valuable (free time and health).
  • The optimal net worth peak occurs at some point between the ages of 45 and 60.  Going past these dates, you will run out of time to have fulfilling experiences.
  • Recommendations: Get a read on your biological age and mortality.

Chapter 9: Be Bold – Not Foolish

  • Rule 9: Take your biggest risks when you have little to lose
  • Find asymmetric risk: when the upside of possible success is much greater than the downside of possible failure. When you face asymmetric risk, it makes total sense to be bold, to grab the opportunity at hand.
  • Do the bold thing now, rather than in retirement, because the go-go years are very short.
  • The case for moving – don’t let the fear of moving away from two or three people stop you.
    • Questions: how much time do you spend with these people?  How much is a round trip first class ticket from here to there on no notice? (Does this price compare to the salary gain?)
  • For risk-averse people:
    • Whatever bold moves you might contemplate for your life, you’re generally better off making those moves earlier in your life (highest upside and lower downside).
    • Don’t underestimate the risk of inaction – the life you could have lived if you had mustered the courage to be bolder.
  • Recommendations: Realize that at every moment, you have a choice.  The choices you make reflect your priorities, so be sure you’re making those choices deliberately. 

Summary:

What’s the best way to spend our money for maximum enjoyment and in order to generate maximum memories?

  • Invest in experiences that yield long-lasting memories, always bear in mind that everyone’s health declines with age, give your money to your children before you die instead of saving for their inheritance, and learn to balance current enjoyment with later gratification.

Slow Dance by David L. Weatherford

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Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain
Slapping the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?

You better slow down
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Do you run through each day
On the fly?

When you ask: How are you?
Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done,
Do you lie in your bed

With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?

You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Ever told your child,
We’ll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die

Cause you never had time
To call and say, “Hi”?

You’d better slow down
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through the day,
It is like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life is not a race.
Do take it slower.

Hear the music
Before the song is over.

Rich’s thoughts: I love this poem and is a constant reminder to be present and fully in the moment. Take action now. Don’t wait for tomorrow.

7 Lessons from Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom (7/10)

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1. “Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”  

  • “The things you spend so much time on — all this work you do — might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things.”
  • “So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half – asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things (materialistic things).”
    • Once you know you’re dying, you focus on what really matters (family, friends, community, etc.).  Why can’t that be all the time?

2. On the meaning on life

  • “The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”
  • “You notice,” he added, grinning, “there’s nothing in there about a salary.”

3. “Giving makes me feel like I’m living.”

  • “The opposite, we know, is false. Taking never makes you feel alive. It may be the basis of marketing, commercialism, Madison Avenue — but we know what Morrie said about “not buying the culture.” Taking a new car, a new suit, a new flat – screen TV — none of it will make you feel alive. It’s a temporary thrill, gone quickly when the new smell (or the warranty) wears off.”
  • “That you spent your days giving. Of your time. Of your heart. Of yourself. That’s how you live on, for a day, or, through others, generations.”

4. On being present (one of the key ways to give to others)

  • “I believe in being fully present,” Morrie said. “That means you should be with the person you’re with. When I’m talking to you now, Mitch, I try to keep focused only on what is going on between us. I am not thinking about something we said last week. I am not thinking of what’s coming up this Friday. I am not thinking about doing another Koppel show, or about what medications I’m taking.
  • Along similar lines (about the past and future)
    • “Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it”.
    • “Don’t assume that it’s too late to get involved.”

5. On detachment

  • “But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.”
  • “Take any emotion — love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions — if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them — you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.“
  • “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.”

6. On aging

  • “It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty – two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty – two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”
  • “Mitch, it is impossible for the old not to envy the young. But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that. This is your time to be in your thirties. I had my time to be in my thirties, and now is my time to be seventy – eight.
    • “Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do”.

7. On marriage

  • “There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike. “And the biggest one of those values, Mitch?” Yes? “Your belief in the importance of your marriage.”

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

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8 / 10

This is a story about Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, who had terminal pancreatic cancer at 41.  He wanted to leave a legacy by writing about his life lessons to pass onto his young three children.

Overall, it makes you want to maximize the time you have on earth because you may find one day that you have less than you think.  Tell your loved ones that you love them. 

Learnings from his football coach:

  • Fundamentals: You’ve got to get the fundamentals down, because otherwise the fancy stuff is not going to work.
  • Feedback: “When you screw up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.” When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a bad place to be. You may not want to hear it, but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love and care about you, and want to make you better.”
    • Dutch Uncle – a person who gives you honest feedback.  Need more of this nowadays. 
  • Building self-esteem for kids: “You give them something they can’t do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.”
  • Head fakes – teaching people things they don’t realize they’re learning until well into the process. E.g. sports teaches teamwork, perseverance, sportsmanship, value of hardwork, and ability to deal with adversity.

Lessons:

  • Failures/Setbacks: Brick walls are there for a reason.  They’re not there to keep us out.  Brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.
    • Luck is indeed where preparation meets opportunity. 
      • Randy prepared 80+ hours and conducted interviews to nail his conversation to become a Disney Imagineer.
    • Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.  And experience is often the most valuable thing you can offer.
  • Not everything needs to be fixed (dented cars or dented trash cans; as long as it works fine, don’t bother)
  • Play the cards your dealt – Randy and his wife Jai had a premature baby and instead of saying this isn’t fair, they focused on things they can do to help the outcome in a positive way.

On Time Management:

  • Time must be explicitly managed, like money – think of your hourly rate and outsource/delegate tasks to others that are cheaper than your hourly rate.
  • You can always change your plan, but only if you have one – write out your goals, have a to-do list
  • Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things? Are your goals, interests worth pursing?
  • Develop a good filing system – keep things organized (alphabetical, color coded, etc.)
  • Rethink the telephone – use speaker phone and multitask; to have a shorter conversation – stand while talking or call at 11:55am (people want to eat lunch at 12:00pm).
  • Delegate – maximize your time with tasks that only you can and should do.
  • Take a time out – relax and recharge your batteries.

How to Live Your Life

  • Dream Big and fuel your kid’s dreams (let them paint the walls!)
    • Let your kids find their passions and their path
  • Don’t Complain, Just Work Harder – don’t whine; use that time and energy from complaining to solving the problem
  • Treat the disease, not the symptom – get to the root cause
  • Don’t obsess over what people think – no one really thinking about you; they’re probably concerned more about themselves
  • Look for the best in people – assume positive intent
  • Watch what they do, not what they say
  • Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right – stay positive.
  • Handwrite a thank you note
  • Show gratitude, be a generous gifter

How to work in groups:

  • Meet people properly– know their name and can pronounce it properly
  • Find things you have in common– easier to connect with people so you can have disagreements later on
  • Try for optimal meeting conditions – make sure people aren’t hungry, cold, or tired. Lunch meetings
  • Let everyone talk– don’t finish anyone’s sentences; don’t interrupt
  • Check egos at the door– label the idea, not the originator  – say “the bridge story” as opposed to “Jane’s story”
  • Praise each other– find something nice to say, even if it’s a stretch
  • Phrase alternatives as questions – Instead of saying: “I think we should do A, not B” try “What if we did A, instead of B”

How to give a proper apology (3 steps)

  1. What I did was wrong.
  2. I feel badly that I hurt you.
  3. How can I make this better?

The Journey to Happiness

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My name is Rich and this is my personal blog with the goal to document the methods that I’ve been trying to become a better and happier person in my life.  This is a journey that I have embarked on since the beginning of 2017.  I am attempting to inspire others to achieve happiness, either financially, emotionally, or spiritually.

My Father

I do believe there is a ying and yang with everything in life.  In order to feel happiness, you need to feel sadness.  On November 22nd, 2016,  my father passed away from ongoing symptoms of pneumonia and flu.  This was nearly a two year battle that started in January 2015.  I remember the last time that I saw him fully healthy.  We were having a family dinner in Chinatown with my dad, mom, and wife, which we routinely did each month.  My wife and I were getting over a cold, but decided to meet with my parents.

A few days after dinner, he called me one night and said that he couldn’t breathe.  I was a bit skeptical as my father was very anxious about his health at times.  He had a liver transplant in 2008 and he took his new liver well with his medications.  The medications often had side affects that increased his anxiety about his health.  Overall, he was a healthy man that was very independent and active in the Chinese Senior Association.

Later that night, he went into the emergency room and they gave him some antibiotics after they determined he had pneumonia and the flu.  He was eventually discharged as his symptoms cleared.  However, within the next few days, he pneumonia returned and again, rushed back into the emergency room.  After a bit longer stay, they again discharged him once his symptoms went away.

Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU)

After about a week or two, he went into the emergency room.  But this time, he would ultimately be in the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) for a 40-50 day stay.  This was a horrific ordeal for our family – to see my healthy father become dependent on life support.  He was on a breathing machine to assist with his breathing.   The doctors gave him a 50/50 chance to survive as they couldn’t diagnosis the exact cause for his condition (cryptogenic organizing pneumonia aka COP was the official diagnosis) and treatments were complicated due to his liver transplant, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from his days of smoking, chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), and a pacemaker.

My father is a fighter and battled his way back.  He was able to come off of life support, but was so frail and lost over 20-25% of his body weight (and he was a small guy to begin with – 125-130 lbs).  He spent the next 5-6 months in a long term acute care hospital (LTAC), where we continued to make an effort to visit him every day.  It was a painful process where any progress he made was matched with setbacks.  Everytime he took one step forward, he took two steps back.  It wasn’t until mid-August 2015 until he was able to come home.

The Return Home

Although he returned home, he was not the same man.  Breathing is one thing that we all take for granted.  The way to understand his condition was imagining like you’re drowning and grasping for air constantly, but never getting enough.   You have this hunger for oxygen that you can never satisfy.

My father always had a healthy appetite and could eat more than I could, but things were hard to swallow and he was never hungry.  Things he loved to eat tasted different and food was always so salty.  He never regained the weight he lost.  His body was working so hard to breathe and his muscles were so debilitated for being bedridden for so long, he could never eat as many calories as he burned.

Deja Vu

Winter came again and our biggest fear came true: the pneumonia resurfaced and we repeated the same process again in early 2016.  This stay was less intense, however, and he was only in the MICU for a 2-3 weeks and less time on life support.  We went through the same ordeal – weaning him off the life support, gaining his strength back, moving him to an LTAC to rehab him back home.  This went on for a few more times in the 1st half of 2016.

My father was rushed into the hospital in July 2016 after discovering a high levels of xxx in his blood results.  It appears that his CML had blast crisis.  This was a major blow.  CML is usually a manageable disease by taking some prescribed medications.  Unfortunately, those medications were known to have side effects (Gleevac) with the lungs and he ultimately stopped taking them.  Once you cross the line with CML and go into blast crisis, there is no turning back.  Life expectancies drop significantly and most patients have 2-3 months to live at most.

Our Options

  1. Bone Marrow Transplant – chances of my frail father surviving a transplant were slim and not guaranteed to fully work and could have difficulty finding a suitable donor.
  2. Chemotherapy – this would delay the CML from progressing, but would only temporarily help. The expectation of patients would be to obtain a bone marrow transplant.
  3. Experimental clinical trial studies – this would require us driving from Philadelphia to NY and try very early stages of clinical trials, of which, my father may not even be a candidate due to his frail condition.

We opted for the chemotherapy, where he would get injections for 7-10 days and require to come back to the hospital for blood work at least twice a week, with the likelihood that one of his visits required a blood transfusion.  The blood transfusions helped my father with his energy and breathing, but he had issues early on due to transfusion associated circulatory overload (TACO).   Again, we had frequent trips to the emergency room as he constantly felt a shortness of breath and weakness from the treatments.

First round of chemotherapy worked well.  The cancer regressed and we were hopeful that this could possibly work out.  Second round didn’t have as promising results as the first.  It also came with other consequences.  The chemotherapy not only clears out all the cancer cells, but also the good cells in the body.  He began complaining of a fever and shortness of breath.  This was the final straw for my father. His body was so deconditioned from the pneumonia, flu, loss of muscle and weight, and now the blast crisis.

The Last Few Days

After finishing the Philly Half Marathon, I decided to visit his hospital room afterwards to tell him about the great race I just had.  As I entered the room, he was squirming on his bed, eyes glazed back, and grasping for air.  I immediately signaled a nurse and ultimately found myself in a 30-60 minute ordeal where they had a rapid response team stabilize him and intubate him on life support.

My father woke up and was extubated, but this was for the last time.  His body could take no more.  It could not keep pace with the heart and mind to continue living.  It was only a matter of days before my dad passed away.  We were fortunate to be able to say our goodbyes and tell him that we loved him, we thanked him for all the sacrifices he made, and we had a great life together within our means.

It was okay for him to move on.  He saw his two children get married and got to see one grandchild.  He has suffered for so long and was a medical success story to battle for as long as he did.

The Journey to Happiness

This was a long winded way to say that for every stimulus in our lives, we have a choice of how we will respond, a lesson learned from Stephen Covey’s book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“.  My father had a choice to battle back and constantly fought until the very end.  Time is our most important asset in life.  The dying would pay any amount to get an extra week, month, or year.

My response to the death of my father is to ensure that I live the remaining days of my life to the fullest and respect that time that I have here on this earth.  I am in the pursuit of happiness in all aspects of my life – financially, emotionally, and spiritually.

I hope you all join me in long journey.

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