The vacation you take at 70 is not the same vacation
Bill Perkins built a whole book around one uncomfortable question: what if saving for later costs you the experience entirely?
Same beach, same money, same two weeks off. But a hike taken at 32 and the identical hike taken at 74 are not the same purchase — one buys you decades of a body that could still do it and a memory you'll replay for fifty years; the other buys you fewer years to replay it and, often, a body that can no longer manage the trail at all.
In Die with Zero, hedge fund manager Bill Perkins calls the payoff of an experience its memory dividend — the idea that spending on the right thing keeps paying you back every time you recall it, the way a stock keeps paying a dividend after you've bought it. The catch is that dividend has a shrinking window. Some experiences are only available at certain ages; the money to fund them arriving in your 70s can be money arriving too late to spend on the thing it was saved for.
This isn't a case against saving. It's a case against saving on autopilot, past the point where the thing you were saving for is still possible to have.