Money shouldn’t feel this overwhelming — especially when you’re doing everything “right.”
Money & Legacy is a financial clarity podcast for capable, high-functioning families who make good money but still feel stressed, uncertain, or stuck when it comes to their finances.
Hosted by Laura Sexton, Money & Legacy Coach and founder of Accelerate Your Legacy, this podcast helps families move from financial overwhelm to clarity — and from clarity to confidence — so they can build a legacy on purpose.
Many families today aren’t struggling because they lack income. They’re struggling because they’re drowning in information.
Between podcasts, gurus, social media advice, and conflicting opinions, it’s easy to feel frozen — unsure who to trust, which system to follow, or what step actually matters next. When everything feels important, progress stalls.
This show exists to quiet the noise.
Think of Money & Legacy like a conversation with a trusted friend over coffee — where big financial ideas are distilled, simplified, and made tangible for real life with kids, schedules, faith, and long-term goals.
Laura brings both lived experience and professional training to the mic. She and her husband paid off $372,347 in debt, and for more than five years she has coached hundreds of families to gain clarity, reduce financial stress, and move forward with confidence.
Laura is trained in the Dave Ramsey principles of budgeting and debt elimination, as well as Ken Coleman’s clarity-driven approach to decision-making and purpose. Her coaching style is forward-focused, practical, and intentionally impartial — she does not sell financial products or earn commissions — so every recommendation is made solely in her clients’ best interest.
Most episodes are solo teaching conversations, designed to help you:
Cut through financial overwhelm and gain clarity
Build a budget that gives permission, not pressure
Pay off debt with confidence and direction
Make calm, values-aligned money decisions
Create simple systems that work for real family life
Lead money conversations with confidence at home
Occasionally, Laura brings real families onto the show for coaching conversations, where listeners can hear real questions, real numbers, and real breakthroughs — and yes, you can apply to be coached on the show. Select interviews with thoughtful leaders also support listeners on their financial journey without shame or conflicting advice.
At its core, Money & Legacy is about transformation.
This podcast helps you move from: Overwhelm → Clarity → Confidence From reaction to ownership. From stress to peace. From survival to legacy.
As you keep listening, money will feel calmer. Your goals will feel clearer. And your confidence will grow as you lead your finances with intention.
If you’re ready for money to feel simpler, lighter, and aligned with the life you’re building, you’re in the right place.
Subscribe to Money & Legacy so you don’t miss an episode — and share it with a friend you want to see gain clarity, confidence, and a legacy that lasts.
25. Living Fully and Leaving a Legacy: Insights from 'Die With Zero' by Bill Perkins
•Laura Sexton•Season 1•Episode 25
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Welcome to another episode of the podcast, where our host, Laura Sexton, dives deep into the profound insights shared in the book “Die With Zero: Getting All You Can Out of Your Life and Your Money” by Bill Perkins. Join us as we embark on an inspiring journey, exploring the delicate balance between living a fulfilling life and making the most of our financial resources.
In this episode, we’ll explore the concept of embracing life’s experiences while also considering our financial well-being. We’ll discuss how we can find warmth and joy in the present moment, cherishing opportunity as it comes our way. Get ready to be inspired and empowered to create a legacy that goes beyond monetary wealth.
So grab a cozy blanket, a hot cup of coffee, and get ready for a heartwarming conversation that will leave you feeling uplifted, motivated, and ready to embark on your own journey towards a life filled with purpose, abundance, and love. Let’s dive in!
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Laura
Hello, and welcome to the accelerate, your legacy podcast, where we talk all things, money and money mindset. My name is Laura Sexton. I am a trusted financial coach and money mindset specialist. My goal with this podcast is to encourage and inspire you. As you set out on a financial journey that eliminates stress and amplifies freedom. Today's the day you stop paying for your past and start saving for your future. If you're looking for more peace in your finances and margin in your budget you've come to the right place Hey accelerators, welcome to this bonus episode where we are going to talk about the book die With Zero. Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins. I had originally heard about this book from my husband. He recommended it as something that I might enjoy reading. And he was totally right. I definitely did. But I also heard about it on the Dana Perino podcast. I don't know if you know her. She had a vila named Jasper, and she called him America's Dog. She was the press secretary for George W. Bush. And just a really wonderful woman, and I love learning from her. And her podcast is called Everything Will Be All Right. Anyway, so she interviewed Bill Perkins and he was talking about this idea of spending all of your money before you die, just using everything you can before the end of your life. I have mixed feelings about this, so I was really looking forward to diving into this book. I want to be able to leave a legacy based on what I do with my life day to day, but also leave something for the future. Also have plenty of money to live on as I get older and older. And so I was really torn. When reading this book on what I'm thinking, because I agree with a lot of what he says and I disagree with a lot of what he says, and I would love to hear from you guys. Have you read this book, die With Zero? Would you read this book? Is this interesting to you? I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm gonna give you some of mine on page five. Perkins says, what I am an advocate for is deciding what makes you happy and then converting your money into the experiences you choose. Now I'm a hundred percent on board with this, and I think Bill Perkins is absolutely right. You get to make money to allow it to give you a rich and abundant life, and a life filled with experiences and people that you want to fill it with. Now for some people that's traveling for Bill Perkins, he talks a lot about, well, you can't travel, you can't go up all these steps, you can't do all these things when you're old. Some of that may be true, but my life, my experience travels great, but there are other things that I want to have in my life and I want to be filled with. And one of those things is family. We used to go to my grandparents' house all the time and they had a legacy of just creating this space of joy and fun, and I wanna be able to do that with my grandkids. I wanna do that with my kids. I wanna have a place where we are able to have the latest video games. We're able to have friends over. We have a fridge in the garage. I don't know about you guys, but growing up, that was like the pinnacle of. Upper middle class to me, like you had to be rich to have a refrigerator in your garage. Like, whoa, I want one of those and I wanna have all the snacks, and I wanna have a place where my kids want to come and gather and they'll sit around the kitchen island while I make food for them. I would love to have that. I am an advocate for deciding what makes you happy and then converting your money into the experiences you choose. That could be travel, that could be staying home, whatever it is you want your money to do for you. That's why we have money. We don't get more money just to have more money. We work, we earn money so that we can have the life that we want later in the book. Perkins talks about shifting goalposts on page 42. He says, for some people it is just easier to keep doing what you've been doing, especially when what you've been doing continues to reward you with society's universal form of recognition for a job well done, a K a money. Now, I love this definition of money. Society's universal form of recognition for a job well done. Rabbi Daniel Lapin says their certificates of appreciation with president's faces on them. I love that we don't make money just to make money. I just said that about the last point. And when we serve our customers, we make money. When we do a good job, we make money, but there's more to life. Than more. Let me say that again. When we are working to make money and we are striving to create this rich and abundant life, there's more to life than just getting more, and this is what Perkins is talking about with these shifting goalposts. We can't say, okay, well when I reach a million dollars, I'll be happy and then reach a million dollars and be like, well, two would be better. I can't, well, I can't stop working until I hit $2 million. In America for some reason, we have this idea of a shifting goalpost. Things are constantly moving. We can't just get to a point and be happy, and a lot of that has to do with our inability to remain content. We need to practice gratitude so that we can practice contentment and when we are content with what we have, we don't have to keep striving for more. On page 45 of the book, Perkin says, if you don't want to squander your life energy, you should aim to spend all of your money before you die. We should use our energy to make money so that we can enjoy it. I agree a hundred percent. And according to Bloomberg, only 48% of employees use their vacation days. We have created in America a culture of work. Hard work is a good thing. But not at the expense of living your best life. I want you to work hard and I want you to strive and I want you to hit your goals and I want you to achieve millionaire status, and I want you to be able to be outrageously generous and to retire into a lovely life. But that doesn't mean you should skip your vacation days, and that doesn't mean. That you should not go on trips with your kids, and that doesn't mean I'm gonna work, work, work, work, work right now, and I'm gonna not take my vacation day. So I'm just gonna power through and I'm gonna do everything I can today because in the future I'll be able to experience good things. Perkins is right when he says that when you're 65, you're gonna have a harder time traversing the streets of Rome than you would when you're 20. I agree with that. I want you to have the big life experiences when they're best for you. Don't skip your vacation days. Save up money so that you can go on a good vacation while you still want to. I don't want you to miss out on the best parts of life. Perkins implies that memory dividends, Trump actual dividends. Now a case could be made for this. Like I said before, we want you to go on those memory invoking trips, like that's wonderful. However, Perkins says that eventually you'll be too old to enjoy your money going so far as to say you'll be too frail to do much of anything. I don't like this thinking. I don't like it at all. Look, you could lose your legs at 20 and not be able to go walk the streets of Rome. I get that and eventually you are too old to go swim in the ocean for far long distances. I get that. But does anything else only mean travel? According to Bill Perkins, the only thing that he wants to do in his life is travel. Those are the only experiences that matter to him. But what other meaningful experiences might you have? What other meaningful things could happen in your life? What other meaningful things do you wanna do? I wanna have a space where my kids and my grandkids and their friends and our whole family gather. That's what I wanna spend my money on. I wanna help with charities and I want to be out outrageously generous and sponsor missionaries and, and do all of these things for all of these people. I wanna buy a single mama car. I have a strong desire for my business to every year buy a single mama car. I wanna do that. I wanna find a woman pumping gas at the local gas station. She's got three kids screaming in the backseat and I wanna walk up to her and be like, Hey, can I buy you guys dinner tonight? Because I see you struggling. I know what that's like, and I want to be able to just be generous with you. That's a worthy cause that's worth spending your money on. And I can do that when I'm 65. I can do that when I'm 85. You see, the older I get, the more meaningful any of my experiences are and it doesn't just have to be travel. Chapter two, Perkins Glamorizes getting a loan from a loan shark to take a trip. I don't want you borrowing money for a vacation ever. You should save up for them and then spend the money that you have budgeted for the trip while you're on the trip. It gives you a huge amount of peace to know that you are allowed to spend your money. You should spend your money. It feels good. But I especially don't want you borrowing money at such higher risk or investment. A loan shark really going to a payday lender. Some payday lenders have up to an 800% interest. That's disgusting. Those should not be legal, and I'm shocked that they are still do not. Put sorrow on top of a blessing. Your vacation should be a blessing. There should be no sorrow added. Perkins also says that you should give when you have it to give. I agree. Give and give. Often. Create a culture of giving in your family, teacher, your children to be givers. Now, Perkins also says that you shouldn't. Wait to give money. You shouldn't hold it. You should give it When they have the need, that's fine. Create a culture of giving in your family and the amount that you give will grow abundantly because that's who you are and it's what you're focused on. Perkins gives a story in the book of a lady who struggled. She was divorced. She had a lot going on and then she cleaned up her life and she got remarried and she was doing much better. And then she inherited money from her parents when they passed, and the lady said, well, this would've been so much better for me when I was struggling to get this money, when I was struggling than when I, when I was older, and I didn't really need it. We don't know the whole story here. Perkins is trying to say that her parents did a bad thing by letting her inherit money when she was older. But they may have had a reason to not give it to her when she was younger. Maybe when she was struggling, she was struggling because she had a drug problem. Maybe when she was younger, she was struggling because she refused to keep a job. Not she couldn't, but she didn't want to. We don't know the whole story and the reason why they didn't. So I feel like this one case study is not really a good point that he is making. I get that when my children are growing up, when they're in their twenties and they're having a hard time, I wanna have money to give them. I wanna be able to lavish my children with gifts. I wanna make sure that they are hard workers and that they don't think I'm just going to cover for them all the time. I want them to have a sense of ownership of their life, but I also wanna be able to take my kids on a Disney cruise if I feel like it. So I understand why he shared the story of this lady who was struggling, who could have used the money when she was struggling, and maybe she's a hundred percent pure and the parents really did a bad thing by not giving her that money when she was struggling. But they may have actually helped her. They may have given her a reason to get her feet underneath herself again. They may have given her a reason to clean up her life and do better, and then they let her in, inherit the money. I talked about this already, but Perkins Fixates on this idea of being too old to do things in retirement, so you should spend time and money while you're young. I wanna ask you, are traveling experiences all there is or is there something more to life? My grandparents enjoyed a quiet, simple and happy existence. My grandpa got to go. Golfing whenever he felt like it. My grandma got to hang out at church and with our church friends, they got to do what they wanted and they were happy. I don't have to travel to Paris every year to be happy. I don't have to buy fancy shoes to be happy. So I want you to think about that. What. Legacy. Do you want to leave? What money do you want to spend now that will keep you from doing something later in life? And what money do you want to save now that will keep you doing something enjoyable later in life? Our legacy is more than dollars. It is, it's more than your bank account. Create a legacy of hard work. Hard work gives us a purpose. Hard work gives us meaning. Develop that culture in your family and in your children. Our legacy can be enjoying time and adventurous together. Yes, but there's more to life than just travel and just spending time doing crazy adventures things. Create a legacy of generosity. Generosity with your time and generosity with your money. I wanna know, can we do both? Can we get everything we can out of our life and money while we're living? And also have something to leave toward children upon our passing. Can, getting all we can from our life and money means saving for experiences, giving and retirement. Can we give to our kids now and when we die, can we teach our kids to live debt free? So if their money can be focused on the future and on fun and on abundance. I feel like Perkins has so many great points. He wants you to live your best fullest, richest, most abundant life. I do too. I want that for you. My question is, can we do both? I think we can. I think that we can live for today and have a rich abundant life today, and also be prepared to care for ourselves in the future. Also be at the point where we didn't have to give every single scent we had up until our dying day. Perkins can get really, he can get really morbid. He's got a death countdown on his phone. I don't wanna live that way. I just don't. I wanna live with hope for the future with reckless abandon for the future. Guys, I wanna hear your thoughts. Have you read this book? Are you going to read the book now that you've heard me talk about it? Do you have answers to any of my questions? I put so many of them out there today. I wanna hear your thoughts. Feel free to reach out to me either send me a DM on Instagram at Accelerate Your Legacy or shoot me an email, Laura accelerate your legacy.com. Thanks for being here with me for this episode. You guys all go out and make a difference. Thank you for spending some of your most precious resource your time. Working on yourself today. But don't just listen to the show. Implement something you heard. If you found a piece of today's show, valuable chances are you have a friend who will too. So please share this with them. And if you feel led, please rate and review the podcast to help spread the word. Remember the legacy you leave is not just dollars and cents and a bank account, but the tools, habits, mindset, and reputation you leave behind. If you have questions or need encouragement, send me a DM on Instagram at accelerate your legacy. Or check out the resources listed in the show notes. I'll be back next week. Bye. For now.
