The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think About the Rest of Your Life » (Abridged)

Lee Eisenberg's last book was the New York Times bestseller, The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think About the Rest of Your Life (2006). The book was cited by Business Week as one of the best books of the year. His is also the former editor in chief of Esquire. Under his stewardship the magazine won National Magazine Awards across a number of writing and design categories. He currently lives in Chicago.

It's the last question you think about before going to sleep, and the first on your mind in the morning. It's a taboo that you can't easily discuss with friends and can barely face with family. It's The Number: the amount of money you need to secure the rest of your life. Do you know what your Number is? Do you know how to think about it? Do you know what you really want to do with it?

A provocative field guide to our psyches and our finances, Lee Eisenberg's The Number will help you have the money conversations you have been avoiding. It will make you think about the kind of life you want and the kind of help you need to achieve it. You will also discover:

Why you wander through your financial "lost years" until it is almost too late

Why downshifting into retirement is so challenging

How the second half of life is being reinvented as we live longer

An important program for anyone over thirty, The Number...

Publishers Weekly

Eisenberg's arc through life could be used to define the baby boom. In the 1970s, he coined the term power lunch; in the 1980s, he edited Esquire and invented rotisserie baseball. In the 1990s, he wrote books on finding the good life through golf and fishing, and at the end of the decade, he joined an Internet retailer. These days, he's thinking about retirement, particularly about his Number: the amount of money he'd need to have socked away in order to be confident that his postretirement life would meet his expectations. Everyone's Number is different, Eisenberg says, and though his book is not an especially useful financial guide, it isn't really meant as a how-to. Instead, it provides an illuminating and charmingly written consideration of an aging generation's retirement worries and of the investment business designed to profit from them. Heartfelt discussions of goals, health and health care, "downshifting" to enjoy life while spending less money and the meaning of postretirement life pepper its pages. Financial planners are interviewed, partly to get information about savings and investment, but mostly to explore the meaning of the field and the type of people who practice it. A few of Eisenberg's chapters feel scattershot, but his perceptive analyses of real and fictional people's financial hopes and strategies will inspire readers to reconsider their Numbers and their methods for investing. BOMC Alternate. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

By most standards we were certainly comfortable-not Bill Gates comfortable, but sufficiently flush that we'd never have to worry about setting up house in an empty Sub-Zero carton. But the question of whether we had achieved a sufficient Number, whether we had enough to shelter us from life's jolts, nagged at me more days than not.

PART ONE: CHASING IT

CHAPTER 1. WELCOME TO NUMBERLAND

Most of us were told at an early age that it isn't nice to talk about money, period. It isn't nice to brag about having money, and it's wrong to envy those who have more than we do. The Number is also hard to talk about because it holds a different value for each of us. What's a big Number to me is not to you. The Number can be a hundred thousand. A million. Ten million. Or infinity, if you're an investment banker.

CHAPTER 2. A FIELD GUIDE

Number chasers fall into four basic personality types. Most people are procrastinators. These are men and women who have reached their forties, even fifties, without any sort of financial plan in hand. Avoidance is the name of their game, fear of lifestyle relapse notwithstanding. Why the sloth? Well, some people don't want to think about old age. Others don't understand how they should invest. All are in limbo, concerned lest they discover they don't have enough to see them through their dotage, or because they can't discuss it with their spouses for fear of starting world war III.

CHAPTER 3. THE EISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLES

We feel discontented about tomorrow. It isn't so much future shock as future denial. There are a half dozen good explanations for why people aren't planning for the next few decades. Call these the Eisenberg Uncertainty Principles, which will guide the twists of the story to come.

CHAPTER 4. DEBT WARP

Debt Warp holds that our whip-it-out credit card culture makes it so easy to buy stuff that people delude themselves into thinking they're more affluent, better set for the future, than they are. Debt Warp reshapes reality and turns age-old precepts about frugality upside down.

CHAPTER 5. THE LOST YEARS

Some people stay in the Lost Years Club forever. Some just accept it, others develop a chip on their shoulder when it comes to money. I know quite a few people who carry these chips. They believe that if there was any justice in the world there would be a direct correlation between the size of one's number and one's ability to be funny, original, and charming at dinner parties.

CHAPTER 6. ALONE AT SEA

The impulse to get out the calculator and start planning is most often triggered by the daydream of an early retirement. This reverie, however, is frequently disturbed by all those nasty questions about how much is enough. So here you are, pushing fifty, your doubles partner is dead, and nobody makes eye contact with you anymore. Suddenly, the bottom falls out of your determined resolve. What time does the game come on?

CHAPTER 7. THE FOREST FOR THE TREES

A show of hands, please: how many of you are ready to devote next weekend and many thereafter to arriving at the conclusion that your number may be inadequate and that you're fundamentally clueless as to how to spend your next thirty years in a meaningful way? Maybe it's your employer's fault.

PART TWO: FIGURING IT

CHAPTER 8. CRASH DUMMIES

Until these four strangers showed up, everyone in this book has been real, their names withheld to protect the anxious and uncertain. But these four case studies, and a few others to follow, are members of a fictional family. Think of them as crash dummies, here to do you a favor. They put their futures on the line - to keep you from driving into a wall.

CHAPTER 9. THE HEALTH AND WELFARE CRASH

The fact that life used to end quite abruptly but now has us crying out "are we there yet?" is one reason a discipline known as financial gerontology has emerged. The pioneer in this field is a social scientist named Neal E. Cutler, who believes that financial advisers need to be retrained to have a better grasp on clients' ever-extending life spans.

CHAPTER 10. COVERING YOUR ASSETS

The Number is a delicate web of risks, some of which are within your control, some not, and some sort of are. The risks that are sort of within your control are how long you live and whether you live healthfully. Have you flossed your teeth today?

CHAPTER 11. ADVICE SQUAD CONFIDENTIAL

The Number keeps many people awake nights, with only the tree frogs to provide solace, yet most of them refuse to seek professional help. They think they can work it out themselves. Are they kidding themselves?

CHAPTER 12. NIGHT SWEATS

There's a giant and unruly industry out there ready to provide you with support and counsel. While this country may have a shortage of nurses, special ed teachers, and tool and die makers, it certainly does not lack for asset managers, financial advisers, accountants, insurance agents, securities brokers, bankers, and trust officers, all eager to make your acquaintance.

PART THREE: FINDING IT

CHAPTER 13. DOWNSHIFTING WITH JUNG

Is the Number about money, or is the number about meaning, fulfillment, and life's true calling?

CHAPTER 14. SUN SPOTS

Del Webb was to the American way of retirement what Ray Kroc was to the hamburger patty. He was the one who, for better or worse, hammered together a new American Dream designed expressly, as it turned out, for midlife downshifters.

CHAPTER 15. A NEEDLEMAN IN THE HAYSTACK

Is the Number about downshifting, or is the Number about something more profound? Are places like Sun City the true destination or just a step in the right direction? Is the Number about where we want to be, or who we want to be?

CHAPTER 16. DEEP BREATHING

Just because you may know how to ladder a bond portfolio doesn't mean you can now skip happily out of Number darkness into bright Number sunshine.

CHAPTER 17. BOTTOM LINES

Even if there are no universal truths about the Number, there are some bottom lines. A bottom line doesn't reach as far or as wide as a universal truth; think of it as a universal truth you get on sale.

APPENDIX: THE NUMBER, QUICK AND DIRTY

Here's a formula you can use to calculate what your Number really is - especially if you know what truly matters.