What Nobody Tells You About Buy Borrow Die
A Silent Enemy
A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend. An entrepreneur, well-positioned, with real assets. He was telling me enthusiastically how he had taken out a loan backed by his portfolio to buy a second property. He didn’t want to sell. He didn’t want to pay taxes. The logic was clean: asset as collateral, cheap debt, inflation erodes the liability over time.
I listened. Then I asked him one thing.
What if inflation doesn’t come back?
He went quiet.
That question is uncomfortable because it touches the invisible assumption holding the entire Buy Borrow Die strategy together: that money always loses value over time. That debt, in real terms, erodes on its own. That time works for the borrower.
It’s been true for fifty years. But it’s not a law of nature.
It’s a consequence of monetary design. And that design is being challenged by something central banks don’t control: technology.
Jeff Booth laid it out with brutal clarity in The Price of Tomorrow. His central argument is simple and disturbing: technology is deflationary by nature. It reduces the cost of producing almost anything. It does more with less. And it does so exponentially, not linearly. If you let it act freely, the natural result is falling prices, a given salary buying more each year, money appreciating rather than depreciating.
The problem is that world is unbearable for any modern state carrying massive public debt.
Because if money is worth more, debt is worth more. And the public debt of developed economies, hovering around 100-120% of GDP on average across major powers, becomes unpayable in real terms. Deflation is the worst enemy of an indebted sovereign.
That’s why central banks have spent decades printing money: not to generate prosperity, but to fight a force that, without intervention, would naturally reduce prices.
They’ve won the battle for decades. But the war is getting more expensive.
What we’re seeing right now is an acceleration of the deflationary forces Booth described as a trend. Artificial intelligence is not a technology headline: it’s a massive compression of costs in sectors that were until now relatively rigid. Professional services, analysis, writing, code, customer support, medical diagnosis. Areas where the marginal cost was human and therefore rising. That is changing at a speed that traditional macroeconomic models aren’t capturing.
The debate about reducing working hours sweeping across Europe right now is a symptom of this. Progressive parties are pushing it with arguments around wellbeing and work-life balance. They may be right for the wrong reasons. If productivity per hour worked grows sustainably because technology amplifies every task, then working fewer hours doesn’t mean producing less. It means the cost of production per unit falls. That prices should fall. That money, again, should appreciate.
In that scenario, the mechanics of Buy Borrow Die reverse.
Think about it clearly. The strategy works like this: you hold an asset that appreciates, use it as collateral to borrow, live off that debt without selling, and when you die, your heirs receive the asset with a stepped-up cost basis and cancel the loan. Time works in your favor because inflation reduces the real value of what you owe.
But in a deflationary environment, every dollar you owe is worth more next year than it is today. Your debt grows in real terms even if the nominal rate stays the same. And if the asset you’re using as collateral doesn’t appreciate fast enough to outpace that appreciation of money, you’re losing wealth while believing you’re being efficient.
You don’t get liquidated all at once. You bleed out slowly.
That’s the risk nobody names, because nobody has lived through this scenario in the context of leveraged personal portfolios. Personal finance books were written in a world of structural inflation. The financial intuition of most managers formed between 1970 and 2020, a period where betting against money was almost always correct.
That period may have been the anomaly.
The answer isn’t to abandon intelligent leverage. It’s to calibrate it more precisely and use it only on assets that have a structural reason to appreciate even in deflation. Bitcoin fits that category not because it’s technology, but because it’s the only monetary asset with an absolutely fixed supply independent of any central bank.
If money appreciates, the asset competing with money in scarcity appreciates too. Gold follows a similar logic, though more slowly.
A mortgage on a property financed on the hope that inflation will dissolve it over time is a bet on monetary policy. And monetary policy, in a context of technological deflationary pressure, can surprise you.
The question you should be asking isn’t how much can I borrow.
It’s: what asset am I borrowing against, and is that asset harder than money in a world where money might start winning?
If the answer is no, time isn’t working for you. It’s working against you.