Leaving Everything on the Field

As a young soccer player, one of the phrases embedded in my mind was “Leave everything on the field.”

It wasn’t my best effort unless I crossed the lines winded, burning, and cramping, Most coaches instill a similar mantra in their players to express the value of hard work.

Early in my professional journey, I was fortunate enough to work with some experienced professionals at the twilight of their careers. When they retired, most had grand plans to travel the world and do the things they never had time to do. But when I'd see them again, those plans were still on hold. This shaped my thinking about time-money-life experiences ever since.

In his book, Die With Zero, author Bill Perkins asks the reader to re-think our idea of saving for our post-retirement lives.

Perkins quotes a 2018 study from the Employee Benefit Research Institute that claims for retirees in their sixties to nineties, the median household spending to household income hovers around 1:1. He goes on to cite that retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent a median of 11.8% of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. Despite having smaller margins, retirees with less than $200,000 saved for retirement had spent only one-quarter of their assets. Retirees on pensions spent only 4% during the first 18 years after retirement. Even with their limited spending, one-third of retirees increased their assets after retirement.

The point Perkins is trying to make is that we tend to over save and under spend in our retirement years, leaving the remaining balance to our family, favorite charities, or the government if we haven’t prepared.

The idea isn’t to promote reckless spending but to reconsider what we’re preparing for in the later years of our lives.

Eventually, this leads us to time.

We spend much of our adult lives understanding what our time is worth, but once we fully maximize the monetary value of our time, we have less physical capacity to enjoy it. So instead of retiring with visions of experiencing life to its fullest, most of us end up remaining in our worn paths, riding out our days, and never doing the things we’ve always wanted to do. We essentially die with a massive savings of time we never withdraw. All that time spent working and building leads to a treasure of unused experiences.

Perkins asks, why aren’t we leaving it all on the field?

We’re all familiar with the expression “Time is Money.”

What about “Time is Experience?”

How can we build experiential wealth that compounds over time?

At the end of the movie Shawshank Redemption, the narrator Red famously says, “Either get busy living or get busy dying.” Unfortunately, most of us spend our lives preparing to die while forgetting to prepare to live.

Referencing the graphic from the book, when we’re young, pre-marriage, pre-kids, we have ample amounts of time but no money. As we age and become more committed to our family, work, or community, we build wealth but lose time. All the while, our physical health remains strong while we work, provide, and save, until eventually we start to lose the capability to experience all we’ve been saving for.

Think of all the important meetings, double-shifts, overtimes, next projects, next tournaments—the priorities that replace the wealth of experiences we put off for a later date that never materialize.

What family vacation are you waiting for because “it’s not the right time?” Or because of a very important work commitment. Or because there’s a great opportunity to guest play in a big tournament for the special team.

Perkins isn’t advocating for no financial planning or succumbing to massive crippling debts. Dying with zero shouldn’t mean going broke in your 70s (even though we have a system in place that prevents that from happening, for now). He’s not saying don’t give money to family or charity, though he does recommend giving it while we are alive and can experience the full impact. He is suggesting to maximize the wealth of life experiences while we still can. Dying with zero means planning for a lifetime of experiences and financial contributions so we aren’t left with regrets.

Dying with zero means leaving everything on the field.