The $4.2 Million Man Who Couldn't Spend His Own Money

Real wealth is the freedom to do what you would have done anyway, but without the friction of having to do it. So if I had to put it in one sentence, again I've spent five years trying to put this in one sentence, I would say, "Real wealth is the freedom to spend my hours doing the things that on my deathbed. I will be glad I spent my hours doing." Hello friends, this is Tyler Gardner welcoming you to another episode of your money guide on the side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing. So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be. Like note before we dive in, August pre-order incentive for my book Real Wealth is now live, and this one is my favorite so far. Pre-order this month, tell me you did at TylerGardner.com/book, and I will send you a draft chapter of a new book that I'm already working on, and no, not even my editor at Norton has seen this writing yet. This sneak peak is yours to keep delivered to your inbox in early September. Pre-order today and you're locked in for every monthly incentive through December 1. TylerGardner.com/book, now let's get into it. A few years ago, a man I'll call Edward. Early 70s retired engineer, three grown children, 4.2 million dollars in invested assets, paid off house in Ohio, no debt of any kind. Sat across from me at a wooden table at a coffee shop, and told me with what I can only describe as a kind of subtle longing that he and his wife had not taken a vacation in 11 years. I asked him why. He said, and I want you to hear this exactly as he said it, "We're worried we won't have enough." I want you to sit with that sentence for a moment, "We're worried we won't have enough." From a couple with 4.2 million dollars, no debt, paid off house, no dependence, and Social Security checks landing every month like clockwork. By every objective measure, every Monte Carlo simulation, every withdrawal rate framework, every spreadsheet a financial planner could possibly run, Edward and his wife had enough. They had emphatically enough. They had several times enough. If their portfolio dropped 50% the next day and never recovered, they would still have enough. And yet, I sat with Edward for two hours that morning. We ran the numbers over and over. We projected his portfolio to age 95 at a 3% withdrawal rate. Then at a 4% withdrawal rate, then at a 5% and 6% withdrawal rate. Every projection ended with him dying with more money than he had retired with, often substantially more. The math was in a gentlest possible way, embarrassing. So Edward listened, he nodded, he thanked me, he went home. We followed up six months later. He had still not taken the vacation. This is part 5 of the D-Cumulation Series, the final episode, and it is, I want to say up front, the episode the entire series has been pointing toward. Because everything we've covered up to this point, the buckets and the withdrawal orders and the Rothkin versions and the Irma cliffs and the rising glide paths and the guardrails, all of it, every minute of it, was the technical scaffolding for a question we have not yet asked directly. The question is, how do you actually spend the money? You just spent your whole life not spending. And I'll be honest with you, I don't have a tidy answer to that question as it's going to be different for different people. I do have a framework, I also have some philosophy, surprise. I have high hope, a few useful provocations, but the question itself, the question of how to be in right relationship with money that you spent 40 years not being in relationship with is one of the deepest questions a human being can ask and I'm genuinely not sure that anyone has quite cracked the code. But today we're going to try, we're going to wander around a bit and this will be a mehandering walk. Part 1, the Identity Trap. I want to start with something that I think is the foundational misunderstanding of retirement and that I've seen literally no one in the personal finance space talk about this way. It didn't spend 40 years saving money. You spent 40 years becoming the kind of person who saves money. The savings is a byproduct, the identity is the main event. This distinction sounds semantic, I assure you it's not. If saving were merely a behavior, in activity you performed like flossing or commuting, then stopping the behavior on the day you retired would be pretty straightforward. You'd hang up the saving the way you hang up your workloads, the activity ends, life continues in a new mode. But that's not what saving is. Saving when you do it well for long enough becomes a self. It becomes part of how you understand your relationship to the world. You're not a person who happens to save, you're a saver. The word becomes the noun, the behavior becomes the identity. And once an identity has been formed over decades, once it has been reinforced by every monthly contribution, every dollar of compound growth, every conversation with a friend who admires your discipline, every act of self-restraint at a restaurant where you ordered the cheaper thing. Once that identity has been formed, it does not simply evaporate the day your last paycheck lands. It persists. It persists with the full structural weight of 40 years of accumulated self-concept and it persists with no obvious replacement. The retirement industry, when it talks about the saver to spend your transition, tends to treat it as a switch. You flip from saving mode to spending mode. The framework is mechanical, like changing your oil. That's the wrong framework. The correct frame is that you have to become a different person, not metaphorically, literally. The 30-year project of retirement is the project of dismantling a self. You spent the previous 40 years building and constructing in its place a self that has different relationships to money, to time, to identity, and to the question of what life is for. And that's hard. And it's the hard thing that almost no financial content prepares you for. Edward wasn't failing to spend his money because of the math. He was failing because the math problem and the identity problem were operating on different frequencies. The math said, "Spend. You have plenty." But the identity said, "Spending is not who I am." And it's gotten me to have a massive portfolio and B for all intents and purposes successful. The identity had been built over decades. The math was something we recognized in a single morning over coffee. Surprise, the identity won. The identity will almost always win. And if you don't believe me, just go pick up a copy of James Clears' Atomic Habits. This is by the way, why financial advisors who only do math will fail retired clients. The math is not hard. The math has been the easy part for 40 years. The hard part is now and the hard part is not financial. It is, in fact, existential. This episode is brought to you by Delete May. I just audited every subscription I pay for and I canceled 11. You are the three that survived. Number three, my password manager. 36 bucks a year and the only real cost was learning how many accounts share the same password I've used since AOL Instant Messenger. Number two, my library card. Free, which is cheating, but I read 40 books a year and at hardcover prices, that's $1000 I'm not going to spend. And number one, Delete May. Data brokers legally collect your name, address, phone number, even your relatives' names and sell it to anyone with a credit card. It took me four minutes to find my own address and phone number on a people search site listed next to my family. Delete May is a hands-free subscription that removes your personal information from hundreds of data broker sites, which helps protect you against risks like scams, fishing and harassment. They've spent 15 years doing this. They use their own technology rather than outsourcing your data and there are real human privacy advisors not to mention their wire cutters number one data removal service. I even get a quarterly report of what was removed from the internet. It's my favorite email to get of the year. Get 20% off Delete May consumer plans at joindeleteme.com/tyler20 and use promo code Tyler20 at checkout. JoinDeleteMe.com/tyler20. This episode is brought to you by Gelt. Most of you listening probably already work with someone for taxes, but if you're a solo a real estate investor or a high net worth individual who's seen. CPA has gone completely radio silence since April. This is for you. A great CPA gets in touch with you. They call in July asking if you've thought about something, they don't wait until next March just to react. The moves that actually reduce your tax burden happen right now. PTE elections, S Corp timing, K1 cleanup, and prior year retirement contributions. Gelt is built around exceptional tax professionals focused on your strategies and your relationship powered by cutting edge technology that handles the rest. Designed for those who demand talent and welcome innovation and know the difference between ordinary and extraordinary everywhere. Gelt is taking on new clients this quarter, including an extension rescue program for anyone who filed an extension and needs a deadline safe handoff. And for new clients, they will help model your prior year retirement contribution opportunities and help you fund what's still on the table before October 15th. Visit joingelt.com/tyler to get started. That's joingelt.com/tyler. Part 2. The cost of frugality at the wrong time. I want to do something here that I haven't seen anyone do in the retirement space, which is to argue with real force that over-saving in retirement is a real cost. Not a missed opportunity, not a slight inefficiency, a genuine, quantifiable life-shaped cost. Most retirement content is built around the fear of running out. The 4% rule exists because of the fear of running out. The bucket framework exists because of the fear of running out. The conservative glide path, the cash buffer, the guard rails, all of it is structurally biased toward the catastrophe of out living your money. The bias is reasonable. Running out of money in your 80s is a terrible outcome and it deserves serious planning attention. But there is also another outcome, even more common, in fact way more common, that no one talks about with the equivalent seriousness. The outcome where you die with $3 million you never spent. The outcome where you spent 11 years not taking the vacation. The outcome where you didn't take your grandchildren to Europe when they were 10 because you might need the money when you're 90. And then you get to 90 and you still have this money in your grandchildren or 35 and the window for that kind of trip that you would have taken with them when they were 10 has closed permanently. That outcome, to me, is a tragedy. It's just a tragedy that's harder to see because it doesn't have a visible failure state. There's no moment where the money runs out. There's no phone call to a child asking for help. It's just this slow accumulation of things not done, dinners not eaten, gifts not given, experiences not had. And then at the end, in a state that goes to children who are themselves in their 60s and don't particularly need it. Bill Perkins wrote a book a few years back called Die With Zero. I've talked about this on a few episodes. The title is provocative on purpose. This central argument is that the goal of a financial life is not to maximize the size of your portfolio at death. It is to maximize the experiences purchased with your portfolio across the entirety of your life. Money has a time value, but so does experience. A trip you take at 65 is not the same trip you would have taken at 35 and not because the destination would be different. The trip is different because you are different at 65 than you were at 35. The 35-year-old version of you who would have taken that trip no longer exists. The 65-year-old can take a different trip and should, but the 35-year-old's trip is gone. Permanently, regardless of how much money you have. This is, I think, the most underweighted truth in retirement planning. Money has a half-life, or more precisely, the utility of money has a half-life. A dollar in your 60s buys a different set of experiences than a dollar in your 40s. A dollar in your 80s buys a smaller set still. By the time you reach your 90s, most of what money could have bought you, the physical adventures, the long travel, the active engagement with grandchildren who are now adults, is gone. Not because you can't afford it, but because your body or theirs, or both, no longer accommodate it. The cost of over-saving is the cost of foregone experience that no future spending can recover. It's the cost of arriving at the finish line with a great deal of unused fuel and no race left to run. I'm not telling you to spend recklessly. I'm not telling you to abandon your bucket frame more completely. I am telling you that the biased is toward conservativeism and repeated across 30 years of retirement. That has a price that we simply don't talk about enough. Part 3. The Permission Problem Edward, the man at the coffee shop, was not bad at math. He had been an engineer. He could run the numbers. He had at various points in his life-run scenarios that proved to be on any reasonable doubt that he had enough. He did not lack information. What he lacked was permission. This is the part of retirement that no financial advisor can solve for. And I want to say it plainly because I think this is at the heart of the entire series we've just spent five weeks covering. The technical work, the conversions, the brackets, the buckets, the guardrails exist in service of a question that the technical work cannot answer. Am I allowed to spend the money? Nobody can answer that but you. No Monte Carlo simulation can answer it. No financial planner can answer it. The many will be happy to take your money to try. The permission has to come from somewhere else. And this is, I think, what people are actually looking for when they do hire a financial advisor in retirement. Not optimization, but permission. They want someone to look at the numbers and tell them with the authority that comes from doing this for a living, that they are allowed to take the trip, allowed to buy the cabin, allowed to give the grandchildren the wedding present, allowed to live the life they spent 40 years funding. But here's the strange thing. The permission, even when granted by a competent advisor, often doesn't take. The advisor can say with all the authority in the world, Edward, you have enough go on vacation. And Edward says, awesome, thank you. And Edward does not go on vacation. Because the permission granted by an external authority never quite penetrates the internal architecture of identity that says, I'm not the kind of person who takes vacation. That permission has to be self-granted. And self-granted permission is one of the hardest psychological feats a human being can perform. One Lamont once wrote in bird by bird that perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism. I would add that hoarding as self-concept is also a mean, frozen form of discipline. The discipline that built the savings becomes in retirement the frozen form that prevents you from using them. So what does self-granted permission look like practically? It looks like a small, deliberate, repeated practice of spending in ways that violate your old identity. Not recklessly, not unsustainably, but intentionally. You take the slightly nicer hotel room when you travel, you order the appetizer and the entree, you buy your spouse the gift you would have previously talked yourself out of, and you do this not because the gift matters in itself, but because the act of doing it begins to construct a new identity. The identity of someone who is allowed to enjoy the work of the previous four decades. The practice is repetitive on purpose. Each small spending act is a brick in the new identity. In my conversation with him on the podcast last year, Bill Perkins described this type of intentional spending as making sure you don't allow your muscles to atrophy. You have to work them out and you've got to work them out repeatedly. The old identity does not yield to a single, dramatic gesture. The old identity yields to a thousand small acts of repositioning. The trip to Italy does not, by itself, transform you into a person who takes the trip to Italy. The trip to Italy and March and the long weekend in May and the dinner with friends in July and the museum tour in September. Those together begin to transform you, slowly, with the same patience that built the savings in the first place. Part 4. The Time Bucket Reframe. I want to give you a concrete framework now because I know that I've spent the last 20 minutes on philosophy and I do in fact owe you something practical to take to the next conversation with your spouse. The framework I find most useful and I'm absolutely adapting it once again from Perkins die with zero is what I'll call the Time Bucket Reframe. The idea is simple and profound. You do not have one retirement. You have several. You have the retirement of your 60s when your body is still most likely capable of most. things, your mind is sharp, your friends are still alive, your grandchildren are still young. This is the active retirement. It is the period in which the greatest range of experience is still available to you. You have the retirement of your 70s. When your body begins to negotiate with you, but you're still profoundly capable, long travel becomes a question of comfort rather than possibility, physical adventure shift in scale, you can still do almost anything. Some things just take a little more planning and maybe a little more ibuprofen. You have the retirement of your 80s when the world starts to contract. Travel becomes shorter and closer to home, the pace slows, the pleasure becomes more local, a walk, a meal, a conversation, a familiar landscape, the body is more deliberate, the mind is, if you've tended to it, still entirely yours. And for many of you, you might have the retirement of your 90s, which is what it is. A great gift if you have it, a period in which the calendar of pleasure is very, very local. The important thing to note is these four phases are not equal in their capacity to use money. They are in fact dramatically unequal. I've mentioned this several times in my argument about why you should take Social Security earlier. A dollar in your 60s can buy a multi-week trip across Europe with your spouse, including hikes and museums and long dinners and the kind of physical engagement that requires legs and lungs and stamina. The same dollar in your 90s, even if your 90s are healthy, will not buy that same trip and you won't have 30 years of memory of that same trip. It will buy something else, something perhaps quieter, perhaps more meaningful, but something different. The framework's prescriptive force is this, front load your spending toward the experiences whose value depreciates with age. The long international trip. The physical adventure. The active engagement with grandchildren who will themselves not be young for long. The cabin you've always wanted while you still have the energy to spend a week there. These are the experiences whose half-life is shortest. They are also almost universally, the ones retirees most consistently defer. The same logic does not apply to all expenses. The annual donation to your favorite cause, the spoiling of grandchildren, the support of an aging sibling. These have less time sensitivity. The visit to a familiar restaurant in a familiar town does not depreciate the way the multi-week hike through Patagonia does. What this framework gives you practically is a way to prioritize your spending without abandoning the conservative principles of the bucket framework. You ask of every spending decision, is this an experience whose value will be meaningfully less in 10 years? If yes, you wait it more heavily now. If no, feel free to defer. Most retirees, when they actually do this exercise, discover that they have been deferring exactly the wrong things. They have been deferring the trips, the experiences, the active adventures, the high decay experiences, and accelerating the low decay ones. The pattern is inverted. This framework helps you invert it back. This episode is brought to you by, called Dera Lab. Quick confession. In high school, my AOL screen name might have been pretty boy-durden, and it wasn't ironic, as well other guys were collecting baseball cards and playing real sports. I was collecting skin care products and taking my appearance embarrassingly seriously. The problem was that almost nothing was actually made for me. It was either borrowed from my mom's shelf or smelled like a department store had a mild panic attack, which brings me to called Dera Lab. High-performance skin care engineered for men. Science backed and clinically tested. The regimen, which I love, is four steps. The eye serum, for when I look like I've been up writing YouTube scripts until 3am because most likely I have been, the base layer moisturizer and the good, their best-selling serum with over 3.4 million antioxidant units per drop. And it's backed by real clinical testing, not marketing claims. 100% of participants, including myself, said their skin looked smoother and healthier, and 94% said it made them look younger. I use it every night, and these days the only sentient being, judging me, is my bloodhound. Pretty Boy Durdon has been playing the long game since 1998, and consistency beats quick fixes in skin care and in investing. So if you've been meaning to take better care of your skin, this is an easy place to start. Head to callderalab.com/tyler and use code Tyler for 20% off your first order. That's calledderalab.com/tyler. This episode is brought to you by FASCIT. If you know who Frank the Tank is and your idea of a nice little Saturday involves heading to Home Depot, this is for you. Because I see you Gen X, and I want to make sure you're ready for retirement. And if you're currently looking for a financial planner, there are three things a percentage-based financial advisor is hoping you never think about. Number 1, it is not necessarily harder to manage more money. Yet these advisors will often charge you more just because you have more. Any massive allocation plan, same phone calls asking how the kids are doing, and yet the fee continues to grow. Number 2, and the line they feed you, the "we do better when you do better," it sounds great until you realize that the fastest way for them to do better might be to put you in riskier assets than you wanted or needed. Your risk tolerance and their incentive structures need to be properly aligned. And number 3, notice how they never tell you the fee in dollars, only the percentage. Because once it's not in dollars anymore, it doesn't feel like dollars anymore. The fastest works differently. One flat annual membership fee, based on the services you need. No percentages, no commissions, just a dedicated team of CFP professionals who help you figure out what you want your money to say about your life. Head to facet.com/tyler to book your intro call, and you'll still have time to make it to bedbath and beyond. I'm not a member of facet, I have an incentive to endorse facet as I have an ongoing fee-based contract for cash compensation, as well as a percentage of equity and facet based on this endorsement. So, if you want to make it to be a facet, you can ask me for a free free free free free free free. I'm not a member of facet, but I'm not a member of facet. I'm not a member of facet. I have an incentive to endorse facet. I have an ongoing fee-based contract for cash compensation. With specifics right after you finish listening to this episode, what is the money for? Most retirees, when they answer this question, give answers that are on close inspection, not real answers. They say things like security or to not run out or to leave something to my kids. I don't think these are answers. I truly believe they're placeholders. Security from what? To not run out so that you can do what? Leave something to your kids who already have their own incomes in 401k's for what specific purpose? The placeholders are easier than the real answers, because the real answers require you to admit what you actually want and what you actually want is harder to articulate than what you think you should want. What you actually want when you spent 40 years saving might be one or several of the following. Time with specific people. Your spouse, your children, your grandchildren, the small handful of friends who matter most in a quantity and quality that your working life did not permit. Engagement with a place. A city you've always wanted to live in. A landscape you've always wanted to spend real time in. A country you've always wanted to know rather than visit. A creative project. The book. The woodworking shop. The garden. The second career that doesn't pay but matters. That you've deferred since you were 30. A practice. Physical intellectual spiritual. That requires sustained attention and that paid work made impossible. A contribution. To a cause. A community. A body of work. An institution. That you've cared about for decades but never had time to serve properly. Freedom from a specific thing. A commute. A city. A relationship. A financial pressure. A kind of meeting. That was the texture of your working life and that you no longer want to feel. These are real answers and money does in fact fund them. Now, here's the part that matters. Most retirees never sit down and ask themselves this question. They never write the answers down. They never share them with their spouse. They never use the answers to direct the spending. The portfolio becomes a thing in itself. The retirement becomes a thing in itself. The original purpose. The reason you save the money gets lost in the management of the money you saved. So I want you to do something concrete this week. Sit down with your spouse or your closest friend or by yourself. Take an hour. Write down what the money is for. Be specific. Not security. Who? With? Where? Doing what? For how long? Not leave something to the kids. For what? To enable what? To teach what? Write the answers down. Read them. Revise them. Show them to someone who's in the room. will tell you the truth. And then, and this is the part that will be the hardest, let those answers direct your spending. Not in the abstract in the next 90 days. What is one thing on that list that you can begin doing in the next 90 days? Book it, schedule it, commit money to it. The portfolio exists to serve the answers. If the answers don't direct the portfolio, the portfolio is just a number on a screen, growing for no reason, eventually transferring to people who will themselves struggle to spend it. That is not what you saved for. That cannot be what you saved for. So let the saving lead somewhere. Part 6. A closing argument for generosity. I want to make a brief case for something that in my experience, retires consistently underweight. And that I think is one of the most underappreciated sources of meaning in the second half of life. Give money away. Well you're alive to people you love. The standard estate plan defers all of this giving until after you die. The money sits in the portfolio until the end. Then in one stroke, it transfers to children or grandchildren or charity often after a probate process that takes a year or two. The recipients receive a windfall they did not anticipate at a moment in their lives, statistically their 50s or 60s, when they've already built their financial lives without it. This is structurally a suboptimal use of a gift. A different model, give the money while you're alive. Strategically, in meaningful amounts, to people whose lives you can actually watch the gift change. The federal annual gift tax exclusion in 2026 allows you to give roughly $19,000 per recipient per year without filing a gift tax return. So a couple can give $38,000 per recipient. You could do this for as many people as you want. Over a decade, a couple can move $380,000 into a single child or grandchild entirely outside of any estate tax framework while watching the gift actually do something in that person's life. But forget about the math because the point is witnessing. If you give your child $50,000 when they're 35 and they're just trying to buy their first home, you get to watch them buy the home. You get to go to the housewarming. You see what the gift built. If you leave them the same 50,000 in your will and they receive it at 60 when the home was bought decades earlier with a smaller down payment and a larger struggle, the money becomes a deposit into a brokerage account. It doesn't build anything visible. It doesn't change what their 30s look like. The witnessing window has also closed. Same dollar amount, different timing, profoundly different experience for both giver and receiver. This is one of the great underused features of retirement. You have the freedom to give while you're alive, to people whose stories you're still a part of. The estate planning framework treats this as inefficient. And yes, there are sometimes good tax reasons to wait. But again, that would be if you're simply optimizing for the sake of optimizing. Because on a human level, the timing of the gift often matters more than the size of it. A $50,000 gift at 35 buys a story. A $200,000 inheritance at 60 buys an entry in a brokerage account. Also, tell the kids when you're funding things. You don't need to be quiet about it. They'll remember the conversation as much as the money. Tell them what you're doing and why. Tell them what you hope they'll do with it. Make the gift a transmission of values not just dollars. The transmission is the actual inheritance. The money is just the medium. I've watched retirees light up when they tell me about the trip they funded for their daughter's family or the down payment they made on a grandchild's first car or the year of music lessons they bought for a granddaughter who has shown unusual talent. I have not in 20 years watched or heard a retiree light up when they tell me about in a state plan that they finalized. The lighting up is the signal. Follow the lighting up. Part 7. What real wealth actually is? I want to close this entire series. Five episodes, roughly four hours, more total finance content than is reasonable to inflict on any human being with the only thing that I think actually matters, which is the question of what we have been doing this entire time and it's the central question I wrestle with all throughout my book, Real Wealth. What is wealth for? Now, I do have a working answer and I want to give it to you in the form it has taken in my own life, with the caveat that yours may be and probably should be different. For me, real wealth is the freedom to do what you would have done anyway, but without the friction of having to do it. For me, that means writing. It means walking with bloodhounds in the woods. It means cooking dinner with my wife in a kitchen that is ours. It means reading books in the morning before the world starts asking things of me. It means a friendship with my own time that the working years did not permit. It doesn't mean a boat. It doesn't mean a second house. And it certainly doesn't mean a watch that costs more than my first car. The wealth, when I am honest about it, is not the dollar amount. The wealth is the absence of the specific kinds of resistance that paid work creates in a life. The freedom from the meeting at 9 AM that didn't need to happen. The freedom from the boss, whose values were not and never will be mine. The freedom from the commute that ate the morning. The freedom from the calendar that someone else owned. So if I had to put it in one sentence, and I've spent five years trying to put this in one sentence, I would say, real wealth is the freedom to spend my hours doing the things that on my deathbed, I will be glad I spent my hours doing. That sentence will be different for each of you. It should be. The list of what you will be glad you spend your hours on is not my list. The point is that there is a list. The point is that the list is the actual thing. The point is that the portfolio exists to fund the list and the list does not exist to grow the portfolio. This is what the entire series has been pointing towards. The buckets, the conversions, the brackets, the guardrails, all of it is in service of a question that you have to answer for yourself and that no advisor can answer for you no matter how much they charge you. What's on your list? And here's the harder version of the question. What would change about your spending, your time, your relationships, your weekly rhythm if you took the list seriously? If you said the list is the point and the money is the medium and the rest is just administrative. That's the saver to spend your transition properly understood. It's not about spending more money. It is about spending your hours in a way that is consistent with what you would have wanted to spend your hours on if you'd had the choice to begin with. The retirement is the chance to do the work of being a human being without the interruption of being an employee. And that my friends is part five and that's the series. The takeaways, if you take nothing else from the last 40 minutes, one, you're not transitioning a behavior, you're dismantling an identity, so please be patient with yourself because the work is real. Two, over saving and retirement is a real cost, not just a missed opportunity. The dollars you don't spend in your 60s cannot be spent in your 90s. The half-life of experience is real and it is steeper than the half-life of money. Number three, permission has to be self-granted. No advisor can do it for you, no spouse can do it for you. The practice is small acts of identity shifting, repeated until the new identity holds. Four, front load of the high decay experiences, the trips, the adventures, the time with people whose own clocks are also ticking, defer the experiences whose value holds. Five, sit down and write what the money is for. Be specific, then let the answers actually direct the spending. Six, give while you're alive, to people whose lives you can watch change. The witnessing is the gift inside the gift. And seven, wealth is not the number. The freedom is to spend your hours on what, in the end, you will be glad you spent them on. This has been the D-cumulation series and I trust it's the most important to stay in work we have done on this show. And I want to thank you because it's the work that was directly shaped by the many of you who have shared feedback about what it is that you're actually struggling to think through as you take one step closer to where you need to be. And if this series was useful, please consider leaving a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. As it helps the show grow, it helps more people find the show and know what it's about. And it helps me appreciate that I'm talking to anyone in this endless void of financial literacy content and that you are in fact finding the show useful. As always, hope this gives you something to think about throughout the week ahead. Thanks for tuning in to your money guide on the side. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to visit my website at TylerGardiner.com for even more helpful reviews. resources and insights. And if you're interested in receiving some quick and actionable guidance each week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter where each Sunday I share three actionable financial ideas to help you take control of your money and investments. You can find the sign up link on my website, TylerGarter.com or on any of my socials at social cap official. Until next time, I'm Tyler Gardner, your money guide on the side. And I truly hope this episode got you one step closer to where you need to [MUSIC]