Have you ever heard of a memory dividend? It's a concept from Die With Zero by Bill Perkins, and this one idea has quietly reshaped how Jessica and I think about our future. It's been so useful for us that I wanted to share it here.
What is a memory dividend?
When you have an experience (a trip, a milestone birthday, helping someone out), you pay for it once. But that's not where it ends.
You have the experience once. You relive it a thousand times. Flipping through old photos. Retelling the funny story from that trip. Staying in touch with the couple you met on a wine tour. Seeing the fridge magnet you brought home. Every time one of those things shows up, you get paid again on the single experience you bought.
That's what the book calls a memory dividend.
Why we front-load
Perkins makes a point that stuck with me: the earlier you have an experience, the more dividends you collect. For one simple reason. More time left to relive it.
He frames it like compound interest. Start early and the dividend pays out longer. Someone who travels in their twenties gets a much longer tail than someone who waits. He even argues that over a long enough life, the memory dividend from a single experience can add up to more total enjoyment than the experience itself.
Jessica and I try to front-load as many big experiences as we can. Two reasons.
The first has nothing to do with dividends. We've traveled enough to see what it looks like to wait until you're old to do this stuff. It's hard work. A lot of the best trips are simply easier when you're younger and healthier.
The second is the dividend. The earlier you have the experience, the longer it pays out. Do something at 40 and you get 50 years of reliving it. Wait until 70 and you get 15. Wait until 80 and who knows if there's any dividend left. Same experience. A fraction of the payout.
Cashing in the dividends
A dividend only pays if you collect it.
Sometimes a memory just pops into your head on its own. But in our family we go out of our way to surface them as often as we can.
Our iPhones keep showing us what we were doing this time last year. Jessica makes a photo book every year of our travels, so every year we get to sit down and relive the whole thing. We hang photos from these experiences all over the house so we walk past them every day. We've started buying digital frames that cycle through old shots. We even built a site to track every country we've been to, with our photos and notes.
That's the part Perkins gets right that most people skip. You can actively work to bring these memories back up. And when you do, the dividend keeps compounding.
The moral is simple. If you're going to create memories, don't leave the dividends to chance. Put in the work to make sure they keep paying out across your everyday life.
The rest of the book
The memory dividend is the idea I keep coming back to, but it's one piece of a bigger argument. A few of the others worth knowing:
Net fulfillment over net worth. The whole point of the book is in the title. Every dollar you leave behind unspent is an experience you never bought. The goal isn't the biggest bank balance. It's the fullest life.
Time buckets. Divide your life into windows and plan experiences against the window where they actually fit. You can't ski at 80. You can't backpack with a toddler at 60. Some experiences have an expiration date, and money can't buy them back.
Spend while you're healthy. Your peak earning years and your peak experience years aren't the same. Health and energy fade, so money saved for 80 can't buy back what your body could do at 40.
Give with a warm hand. If you're leaving money to your kids or to charity, give it earlier, when it can actually change a life, instead of after you're gone.
Know when to stop saving. At some point the job is to draw the money down, not pile more on. Most people never make that switch, and they die with savings they could have turned into life.
If any of that resonates, read the book. Die With Zero is a quick read and one of the few that actually changed how we live.
For a full list of books I've read and recommend, check out this page.