Die With Zero: planned depletion as a FIRE strategy

Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life, Bill Perkins' 2020 book, makes a blunt argument: money left unspent when you die is life energy you worked for and never converted into anything. Perkins' case is that most people over-save relative to their actual life expectancy and end up either working longer than they need to, or dying with a large unspent balance that funded nothing they wanted — his phrase for it is “wasted life.”

The goal he proposes is maximising lived experience — spending deliberately across the years you have the health and time to enjoy it — rather than maximising terminal net worth. That's a philosophy with a real trade-off attached, not a rule everyone should follow: it only works if you are genuinely comfortable spending down to (near) nothing, and it depends on getting your own life expectancy roughly right.

A classic 4%-style safe withdrawal rate is sized with a built-in safety margin: across most historical sequences the pot doesn't just last 30 years, it often ends up flat or larger in real terms — effectively built to survive indefinitely, because it has to cover the worst-case sequence, not your specific life expectancy. A deplete-by-design pot drops that margin on purpose: it only has to fund spending to a chosen end age, so the closed-form required pot is smaller and the same savings trajectory reaches it sooner — FIRE arrives earlier, for the same spend.

That smaller margin is exactly the trade-off, and it carries three honest risks:

• Longevity risk. The plan is only as good as the end age you picked. Outlive your chosen life expectancy and, by design, there's nothing left — a real risk for anyone in good health with a family history of living longer than average.
• Sequence risk near the end. A pot engineered to hit zero right on schedule has no buffer left for a bad run of returns in its final years — precisely when there's the least time left to recover from one.
• The behavioural discomfort of a falling number. Watching your pot shrink year after year, even exactly as planned, is psychologically harder than watching a perpetual pot hold roughly flat — plenty of people who can afford to deplete their pot still can't bring themselves to.

Same inputs into both models: a £40,000/yr real spend target, retirement at 60, life expectancy 90, and a modest 3% real return. The only thing that changes is the withdrawal basis:

Computed by the same two required-pot engine functions that run your plan — a £40,000 real spend, retirement at 60 and life expectancy 90 are fixed, illustrative inputs, not your data. The deplete-by-design pot here is about 22% smaller than the perpetual-style pot for identical spending. Educational modelling, not financial advice.

A smaller required pot on the same savings trajectory means it's reached sooner — but exactly how many years earlier depends on your own contributions, growth and current pot, not a generic illustrative example. Ember computes that for your real numbers rather than guessing at it here — see “Where it lives in Ember” below.

Dying with (near) zero also means dying with a small estate — which sounds like it simplifies inheritance tax, but for a cross-border life it can cut the other way. Estates are frequently taxed twice over: once by the country where an asset sits (situs) and again by the country you're resident in at death, with a treaty or unilateral relief — if one exists — reconciling the two. A plan that deliberately runs the investable pot down to near nothing changes what's left to tax in both places, and the details of which allowance or nil-rate band applies where can matter more than the headline “there's less to tax” framing suggests. See estate & inheritance and how Ember models cross-border estate tax for how the waterfall to net-to-heirs actually works.

One precision point worth being explicit about: Ember's drawdown-to-zero model depletes the pot exactly to your life expectancy age, not some other end date. If you model a household with a partner, the survivor's own life expectancy can push that depletion horizon later than either person modelled alone — the couples slice of the engine shifts the target end age accordingly rather than depleting on the first death. Getting that horizon right matters more here than under a perpetual-style pot, precisely because there's no safety margin left to absorb the difference.

On Assumptions, the Withdrawal basis selector in the Withdrawal model section includes “Drawdown to zero (by end age)” alongside the standard and custom SWR options — pick it and your FIRE date is sized to deplete the pot to zero by your life expectancy, not to sustain it indefinitely.

Prefer to keep your main plan on a perpetual-style SWR but still want the comparison? The same page has a “Draw-to-zero secondary target” overlay — a display-only toggle that adds a second FIRE age on the dashboard answering “when could I retire if I spent the pot all the way down to zero by my life expectancy?”, computed from all your other real assumptions. That's the honest, personalised version of the “how many years earlier” question the worked example above deliberately doesn't generalise.

Whichever basis you choose, the dashboard's Overdraw & survival panel reconciles your actual spend target against a sustainable draw year by year, and confirms — for your own numbers — whether the pot genuinely survives to life expectancy or runs dry first.