One piece of advice I’ve received that was particularly beneficial to me came from my erstwhile barber, Butch.

Yep, that was his name. And yep, he specialized in “short” as an aesthetic.

Butch, who had been cutting hair since World War II, told me to take vacations with my kids, even if I thought I couldn’t afford them. I was young, newly married, and we were expecting our first child. I suppose that news is what prompted us to discuss this topic. I vividly recall that he stopped the scissors for a minute to make his point. “You never remember how much a vacation costs. But you always remember the vacation.”

He described moments from his own vacations that were both vague and poetic: watching his children laugh and play in the waves, getting a picture of his wife with Goofy, her favorite character, at Disneyland, teaching his kids how to cast a lure out into a lake. 

This is from a guy who landed on Normandy Beach on D-Day +4. My rough math works out that he was at least 80 when he passed this advice on to me, and he was still cutting hair.

For some time I believed that his advice was junk. Why? Well, here he was, 80 years old and still an active barber. I reasoned that he was a poor money manager. I learned soon after he died that he wasn’t broke from this advice. He wasn’t broke at all. In fact, he owned the building that included his shop and several others. He didn’t need the money. He cut hair because he needed something to do.

But his advice to me reinforced an important idea.  Seldom do we hear of someone expressing a dying wish that they had a larger bank account.

Instead, it seems that people approaching death focus on the people in their lives, and the experiences they had. Some people might wish for reconciliation with a lost loved one. (And we should definitely seek reconciliation.) Some might wish to have more time. Some might wish to have had more travel experiences. But none of them wish they’d made ten times as much money to only have it sitting in their account.

They remember chances they took, mistakes they made. They said “Yes” to the mess and issued in a new set of possibilities for their future.

This seems to scan with our understanding of how life works, and what makes a life meaningful or worth living. From that, we would be wise to take some advice.

In order to live a full and satisfying life, you should give yourself and others the gift of experiences.

Focus on time itself

You can earn more money but you can’t create new memories. You can delay a vacation forever in order to make more money for that vacation.

But why? 

Sure, you might then have more money to spend, and stay at a slightly nicer hotel, or eat at better restaurants, but are you traveling for the hotels? Perhaps partially, but ideally you should be focusing on the experience and the time with the people you love. 

Waiting is a gateway drug to putting things off for too long. And when you do that, these things  may not happen at all. Time and good health are not promised to you. Life offers all sorts of curveballs over time, including deaths, illness, job changes, and surprise expenses.

So get out ahead of the curve. Otherwise you are trading your vacation time to work instead.

Wealth means a lot less without your good health. It’s challenging to walk the Appalachian Trail with your walker.

Why wait until then? 

Focus on the time itself, and the time together.

Business guru Ramit Sethi takes this advice a step further, urging his listeners to anticipate and create an optimal experience. Instead of merely planning to eat out more, you should make plans to eat out less often, but at the best restaurant available to you. This is how you create memorable, experiences for yourself.

Most importantly, give the gift of experiences to yourself and your loved ones. These experiences, and not other gifts, will be what they treasure for the rest of their lives.

An acquaintance of mine several years ago grew disgusted by the rigors and economic demands of big city life. So he took off to tour the continent in his van. With his family. The seven of them are documenting the trip on Instagram @fantastictribe.  

Here are some recent posts:

He is certain that this formative time spent together with his family is more important than the job he was working. 

And he’s right.

Go have experiences

Having an experience – any experience – changes you permanently. Sometimes these are changes for the better, leaving you with an expanded view of the possibilities for your life. Sometimes these are changes for the worse, leaving your feeling frightened, alone, or powerless. You feel like a new person and, in some important ways, you are.

And while schools have a role to play in our education, the best learning experiences don’t happen in a traditional schoolroom.

Every person grows and changes over time. It is the nature of living. As time compounds, your new experiences are added to previous ones, they are re-lived and echo through your actions, your experiences, your tastes. Eventually they turn you into a new version of yourself. A version of yourself that is curated – selected from the best versions from before.

You can – and should – become wealthy in experience instead of in cash. These experiences change your life and magnify out into the best possible version of your future self.

With Butch’s advice in mind, my wife and I worked to give our children experiences. One birthday our son got to fly a small airplane from a local airfield. Our daughter experienced a helicopter tour of the city. Our son celebrated one birthday by driving a formula 1 race car around a track just a couple hours from our home. Zip-line courses, ocean visits, and even a cruise to the Bahamas were part of our children’s inheritance. And thanks to a wonderful and rich public Montessori school system in Cincinnati, they had multiple experiences away from us as well.

I know that I was blessed to have a steady income, and periods of free time to engage in these sorts of events. But the principle applies to most families, even if the scale of the experience needs to change.

There are experiences to be had in free museums and nearby zoos, at community concerts, or in creating things together. These can all happen as your savings account allows.

In the old model of saving up for a vacation, you were stuck in one place. You kept compromising your future self, promising it that you were going to be your old self for just one more week, or one more month, or one more year. You were wearing your old self into a groove, in the hopes of having a transformative experience.

I’m suggesting that when possible, the experience should come first and shape your child’s life – and your own – sooner.

You have more time to enjoy and magnify the use of the memory of these trips.

Nothing is promised to you. There is joy in living in the moment and pursuing your best self right now.

You don’t need massive savings

The life cycle hypothesis, as explained in the book Die With Zero by Bill Perkins, says that the most prudent way to live is to spend your wealth over the course of your entire life. This replaces the usual plan of working so hard through your healthiest years simply to accumulate money.

Why put away money now to give it to your older, richer self who is making even more money as a more experienced professional? That older version of yourself will be okay without you having given them every penny you have earned. Worse yet, the old version means that you die with a large bank account, not having had the experiences that could have made your life rich.

What if your boss asked you to work for free, Perkins asks? Would you do that? Probably not. 

What about all that money you are earning in order to save it up? Every dollar you fail to spend before you die, represents wasted labor. This is money that you might be unable to use, and thus wasted hours of working for … well, essentially for free. 

Instead, in the life cycle hypothesis, Perkins encourages us to pursue life-changing adventures while we still have a great deal of life left to be changed.

It is common to want to wait until retirement – typically 67 years of age – to enjoy our savings. But why? In actuality, our real golden years arrive much earlier than retirement – as much as a decade sooner when we are 50-55 years old.

The hours that we continue to work and save just in those ten years are immense. And meanwhile we are becoming marginally less healthy, and marginally more likely to experience life-altering health conditions.

What if you, like the average person, ends up passing on a large inheritance? Great, but you may have wasted 6000 hours working when you could have been traveling, spending time with loved ones, or pursuing hobbies.

Isn’t it selfish to spend this money on yourself?

You might ask, isn’t this being selfish?

Perkins encourages you to ask how much of your wealth is yours, and how much is your children’s. Many people think they want to leave a good amount of money for their children, and struggle for a lifetime to do this.

What if, instead, you gave this money to their children BEFORE you pass away? After all, if you live the expected life span, you won’t be giving this money away until your own children will be, on average, 60 years old. Is it really selfish to enrich their lives along the way?

If you’re worried about being selfish, perhaps this is a chance to reframe selfishness as a deep generosity. Consider that your children will benefit far more from getting their inheritance sooner rather than later. Especially if that inheritance is memorable travel experiences that in turn enrich and enliven their lives, with experiences that compound over time.