Would you die with zero?
Updated: Sep 30
I ran 2 Soulful Money Circles this month, both built around the book Die With Zero. We had women from 4 continents, spanning 30s to mid-70s. People who've built companies and people still figuring out what they want to build. Clients, friends, even some I met for the first time on such a call. I'm grateful for what everyone brought to the room — it deepened my own thinking on the central question of the book: how do we want to live?
Because that’s what matters most, by the time you die.
6 Themes from the Circles
Here’s the book summary and resources that I presented (30 min watch). What it doesn’t show is the sacred part of the circle — where the room opens up under Chatham House Rules — to respect the tender, rich, vulnerable and deeply personal stories we honoured each other with. You had to be there to experience the full spectrum of wisdom, guilt, longing, frustration, grief, relief, laughter — sometimes all from the same person inside 20 minutes.
These are the broad strokes that showed up — perhaps it will jolt you into greater intention.
The fear was never running out. It was letting go.
We heard from people across very different financial positions about the same tension:
Someone with a paid-off house who still couldn't picture spending on certain daily “luxuries”.
Someone with real savings still "terrified" to use them for their heart’s desire or work’s calling.
Someone who spent their lifetime saving up for later (the ‘Ant’) for whom spending felt unsafe, alien and wrong.
Across both rooms, nobody's obstacle was math. It was permission.
Watching our parents with money is one of the most repeated griefs in the room — and it runs in every direction.
Parents who:
are financially fine and still won't spend, a scarcity mismatched to present reality.
spent everything on living well and left their kids to work out money alone.
withhold while alive - think dynastic family soap operas, where the patriarch keeps everyone circling and money is leverage rather than love.
None of these resolve in "one right way." That tension — that there is something passed down as part of inheritance that isn’t money — was the richest thread across both sessions.
"But I love my job!" got questioned. I needed the pushback myself.
The book treats work as something that mostly costs energy — we “do the time” so we can live well. And there’s social recognition in having worked hard for it. The author is a former Wall Street trader — plenty of people from my old banking life would recognise that lens on work.
But with the Live True audience of purpose-seeking entrepreneurs, for whom meaningful work generates energy, this rationale for dying with zero got questioned.
I feel this tension personally: while my current work is where I find flow, there are other things I love too - important to balance against my own recovering perfectionist/high-performer instincts that prioritise work.
Financial advisors keep failing at this exact conversation.
More than one person independently described sitting across from an advisor where the conversation went dead, once asset accumulation went out the window. One was visibly written off the moment she said she wanted to spend while she's alive rather than build an estate. That's the gap I sit in professionally — helping people make high-stakes money decisions that spreadsheets alone don’t address.
Guilt showed up uninvited, unexpectedly.
On choosing relationships over maximising net worth in one’s lifetime.
On not being able to give their kids what their own parents gave them, or what their peers seem to be doing.
Folks recognised it in themselves and others in real time. Naming it is powerful — it lets you look at the choices you've made, and choose again with your eyes open. I often see people come out the other side feeling affirmed with clarity and intention.
The list did something the ideas alone couldn't.
Some had never once written down the experiences they want to have in their lifetime. This bucket list is a wishlist.
The recommended exercise gets you closer to a plan — not just what, but who you want there, when, how often.
A number of folks already living this philosophy and had a list already — long, sprawling, and precisely because of that, paralysing.
For at least one person, assigning “experience points” to each item was the actual unlock, that turned an unusable wishlist into clear decisions.
"There is so much I want to do, but no single thing I feel truly pulled toward. Hopefully the points system and the allocation of time might help me get some clarity… Thank you again for sending it — I really was in need of this to move forward in some aspects.”
How I live this work
As always, I roadtest any frameworks I offer my community. I brought my own list into the circles - handwritten, messy, in process.
Because of the exercise, I saw that some of the things I prioritise now I can actually still do post-60. But these items are on a serious clock due to physical limitations - mine and others':
A commitment to make photo albums - if not every year, then every decade.
Trapeze school.
A real handstand, not the elbow headstand I've got now.
Skiing, every year, for as long as my knees say yes.
Dancing, ideally with my husband — this is a running joke in my marriage, between a sportsman who cannot move his feet to rhythm and me with my musical gifts and short temper.
Interviewing my parents and their siblings about their lives, and my grandparents'.
A multi-generational sojourn to our ancestral island.
On a 2-hour walk during our staycation — that I readily chose the nicer hotel for $400 more, as a result of this book — I downloaded to my husband the book summary and my thoughts. And a few things got decided:
His 50th birthday next month. We'd been circling a big celebration; somewhere in this conversation, it stopped being a maybe.
We're skiing in March, no kids, with friends.
To make time in the now for what cannot be accomplished in one long weekend. E.g. the dancing came under negotiation. I’ve offered padel/ pickleball in exchange so we both lovingly suffer some discomfort for the other (and hopefully make positive memories too!)
We’ll be re-running our “Will I Be OK?” numbers after he shares back his list too. Overall, we’re excited knowing that there is much to look forward to in our remaining "go-go" years, as a result of intentional planning. And that we can enjoy wholeheartedly the fruit of the labours of our early and present efforts, knowing that those we care about are also taken care of well.
Your first move
Dying with zero by choice is a different thing entirely from running out by accident, or a result of unplanned circumstances. One is intentional. The other is fear, realized.
I recommend working on your list first, before the numbers. That part is real, but it's putting the cart before the horse, once you have crossed your survival threshold.
Running the numbers will help you scope the next level of specifics (e.g. how much to give to who, and when) and ensure you won’t run out by accident. That’s the whole reason I built “Will I Be OK?”: not to tell you to spend or to save, but to show you the room you actually have, so the choice feels less like a wild leap, and more like an invitation to open those theoretical doors behind which our dreams reside.
If you want to try the exercise yourself, the same 6 questions are in the handout — plus space to build your own list.
The book's clarion call isn't to go chasing experiences starting tomorrow. Or to disrupt your careful ‘Ant’ avatar with the reckless YOLO of the Grasshopper. It's that you stop letting business-as-usual or blind fears carry you through years you won't get back.
Start the exercise. That's the first step.
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