Die with Zero

Die With Zero

Jason Ruffo was broke. He was twenty-something, splitting the rent on a Manhattan apartment so small you could practically reach the stove from the bed, making eighteen thousand dollars a year as a screen clerk at the New York Mercantile Exchange. His roommate, a young trader named Bill Perkins, was making roughly the same. Neither of them had savings. Neither of them had a safety net. And yet, one day, Jason told Perkins he was going to quit his job for three months, fly to Europe, and backpack across the continent.

The trip would cost about ten thousand dollars. Jason did not have ten thousand dollars. So he borrowed it from a loan shark. An actual loan shark, with actual interest rates that would make a credit card company blush.

Perkins thought his roommate had lost his mind. Who borrows ten thousand dollars at predatory interest rates to go on vacation when you are barely scraping by? That is not what responsible people do. Responsible people save. Responsible people plan. Responsible people defer gratification until the numbers make sense.

Jason went anyway.

He spent three months wandering through Europe. He slept in hostels, rode trains, met strangers, watched sunrises over cities he had never heard of. When he came back, he was broke again. Worse than broke, actually, because now he owed a loan shark.

Years later, Perkins became spectacularly wealthy. He made a fortune trading energy stocks for a hedge fund, became a professional poker player, built businesses, amassed tens of millions of dollars. And from the vantage point of that wealth, looking back across decades of life experience, he arrived at a conclusion that surprised him.