Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

Perkins was born in 1964, in Jersey City, New Jersey, to a criminal defense attorney father who briefly played football for the New York Jets and a schoolteacher mother. Perkins pursued a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Iowa, where he also walked on as a defensive back for the Iowa Hawkeyes football team, though he left the team before his senior year. Despite not having stellar academic performance, his engineering education would later inform his analytical approach to financial markets.

Perkins began his financial career in 1991 as a trainee clerk at the New York Mercantile Exchange, earning a modest salary of approximately $16,000 annually. His determination was evident in his early career when he reportedly showed up at the Exchange daily until he secured a position. To supplement his income during this period, he drove a limousine in the evenings while dedicating his nights to studying market dynamics.

His career trajectory accelerated in 1995 when he relocated to Houston, Texas, during the deregulation of the electricity market. There, he managed a derivatives and options trading desk. The pivotal moment in his career came in 2002 when he joined Centaurus Energy, a hedge fund founded by former Enron trader John D. Arnold. At Centaurus, Perkins achieved remarkable success, reportedly generating $1 billion in trading profits for the firm. His strategic insight was particularly evident in 2006 when he took positions opposite to Amaranth Advisors, contributing to that firm’s collapse and helping make Arnold the youngest billionaire in the United States at that time.

Following the closure of Centaurus Energy in 2012, Perkins founded Skylar Capital, his own hedge fund focused on trading US gas futures, options, and swaps. The fund raised $102 million in capital within its first three months of operation and reportedly managed approximately $500 million in assets as of 2023.

Beyond energy trading, Perkins has diversified his professional activities to include film production, high-stakes poker playing (with tournament winnings exceeding $5.5 million), and charitable endeavors.

Perkins’s book Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life represents the culmination of financial philosophy he began developing during his early career at the New York Mercantile Exchange. His experience witnessing individuals who accumulated substantial wealth but failed to derive fulfillment from it informed his contrarian perspective on personal finance.

The central thesis of Die With Zero emerged from Perkins’s observations in the financial world. While working in an industry focused on wealth accumulation, he recognized a fundamental paradox: Many financially successful individuals postponed enjoyment indefinitely, saving excessively only to die with substantial unused assets. This insight, combined with his understanding of market optimization techniques from his trading background, led him to develop a framework for maximizing net fulfillment rather than net worth.

His engineering education is evident in the book’s analytical approach to life optimization. Perkins applies concepts from financial markets and risk management to personal decision-making, creating frameworks like “time-bucketing” and calculating “memory dividends” that reflect his background in quantitative analysis. His experience navigating volatile energy markets also informed his comfort with strategic risk-taking—a key principle in the book.