Learning to Trust the Process: Redefining Wealth Beyond Money

For decades, I operated from a single assumption: the primary goal of retirement savings was to leave my sons as substantial an inheritance as possible. It felt like the ultimate expression of love—a final gift, a lasting legacy. But recently, I’ve come to trust the process of questioning that assumption, and the journey has fundamentally shifted how I think about money, family, and what truly matters in the later chapters of life.

How a Book Shifted Everything

It started with a provocative title that caught my attention: Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. The central premise—that we should spend our retirement funds to the point of having little left by the time we pass—initially struck me as shocking. Yet the more I read, the more Perkins’ core philosophy resonated: money isn’t a scorecard to accumulate endlessly. It’s a vehicle for creating the experiences that actually make life worth living.

One concept particularly transformed my thinking: “memory dividends.” The idea that meaningful moments continue to reward us long after they happen—through memories that enrich our entire lives. When you spend money on an experience with loved ones, that investment keeps paying returns through the remembrances you carry forward. A vacation, a family dinner, time spent together—these become permanent wealth in a way that a bank balance never can.

I won’t pretend to follow every suggestion Perkins makes. But I’ve started picking and choosing what aligns with our values. Most significantly, we’ve decided to withdraw more from our retirement account than we originally planned. We won’t be wealthy, but we should have greater comfort and freedom. While it feels unconventional, both intellectually and emotionally, I know it’s the right decision.

When Your Children Show You the Way

What surprised me most was my family’s reaction. When I mentioned the book to our sons, both enthusiastically supported the idea—not just of us spending our money, but of us leaving them little or nothing. One pointed out that they’re educated, financially secure, and perfectly capable of building their own futures. They don’t need us to sacrifice our happiness in retirement to fund theirs.

The daughters-in-law echoed the same sentiment: what matters to them is that we enjoy our lives and spend our money freely. They’re managing their own retirements responsibly. They wanted us to understand that the pressure we felt to leave a large inheritance wasn’t coming from them. It was coming from within us.

This realization was crucial. I had to admit that my dream of a substantial inheritance was never truly their expectation—it was mine alone. Learning to trust the process meant letting go of an assumption I’d never questioned, and hearing my children’s actual voices instead of the imagined ones in my head.

The Inheritance That Actually Matters

For years, I calculated our spending based on one principle: touch only the interest and earnings, leave the principal untouched as our final love letter. I imagined my children remembering our sacrifice every time they accessed those funds. But I’ve had to ask myself some hard questions:

If we hadn’t earned enough to build this retirement account, would our children think we loved them any less? If we lost everything tomorrow, would our net worth change how they feel about our affection for them? The answer, of course, is no.

Whatever my expertise in financial planning, I’m clear-eyed about what children actually need—at any age. They need to know they’re loved completely and accepted wholly. No amount of money can communicate that message as powerfully as a parent who is present, engaged, and joyful in their own life.

The real inheritance isn’t what we leave behind; it’s what we model while we’re here. When we give ourselves permission to enjoy life, spend time with those we love, create new memories, and embrace the later chapters with enthusiasm rather than anxiety—that’s the legacy our children will actually remember.

The Bigger Picture: Trusting Life’s Transitions

My journey isn’t unique to retirement planning. Many of us spend our lives operating on autopilot, following scripts we inherited or assumptions we never examined. My husband and I married young, lived paycheck to paycheck while working through college, and like an estimated 42% of Americans, had no emergency savings for years. That background ingrained a scarcity mindset that served us well for a time—but eventually, it stopped serving us.

Learning to trust the process of transformation means being willing to question what we once held as absolute truth. It means listening to the people we love. It means giving ourselves permission to evolve.

The financial data supports this perspective too. Social Security statistics and retirement studies consistently show that the happiest retirees aren’t those who hoarded the most—they’re the ones who spent intentionally on relationships and experiences. The memories these purchases create become the truest wealth.

Moving Forward With Clarity

So here we are, at a crossroads where we’re choosing differently. We’re increasing our spending. We’re planning more experiences with our family. We’re redefining what financial success looks like in our later years. And perhaps most importantly, we’re giving ourselves explicit permission to enjoy what we’ve built.

The process of getting here—reading a challenging book, having vulnerable conversations with our children, questioning decades of assumptions—that process itself has been valuable. Learning to trust it has set us free.