Product Description

Do you know your Number?

What happens if you don't make it to your Number?

Do you have a plan?

The often-avoided, anxiety-riddled discussion about financial planning for a secure and fulfilling future has been given a new starting point in The Number by Lee Eisenberg. The buzz of professionals and financial industry insiders everywhere, the Number represents the amount of money and resources people will need to enjoy the active life they desire, especially post-career. Backed by imaginative reporting and insights, Eisenberg urges people to assume control and responsibility for their standard of living, and take greater aim on their long-term aspirations.

In 1999, Eisenberg was in the midst of downshifting from having served as the Editor-in-Chief of Esquire and other high profile positions. He was "half-in, half-out of the workplace" with an enviable consulting position at Time, Inc., and a family comfortably settled in the suburbs. That's when he received an unexpected offer from the Wisconsin-based Lands' End which, in the end, he couldn't resist. It meant uprooting his family and moving to the rural heartland, and taking on the challenges of an entirely new way of life. Before the move, he admits, "I was worried about the Number." Once in Wisconsin, Eisenberg confesses that the "Number was leading us around by our noses."

From Wall Street to Main Street USA, The Number means different things to different people. It is constantly fluctuating in people's minds and bank accounts. To some, the Number symbolizes freedom, validation of career success, the ticket to luxurious indulgences and spiritual exploration; to others, it represents the bewildering and nonsensical nightmare of an impoverished existence creeping up on them in their old age, a seemingly hopeless inevitability that they would rather simply ignore than confront. People are highly private and closed-mouthed when it comes to discussing their Numbers, or lack thereof, for fear they might either reveal too much or display ineptitude.

In The Number, Eisenberg describes this secret anxiety as the "Last Taboo," a conundrum snared in confusing financial lingo. He sorts through the fancy jargon and translates the Number into commonsense advice that resonates just as easily with the aging gods and goddesses of corporate boardrooms as it does with ordinary people who are beginning to realize that retirement is now just a couple of decades away. Believing that the Number is as much about self-worth as it is net worth, Eisenberg strives to help readers better understand and more efficiently manage all aspects of their life, money, and pursuit of happiness.

* According to Eisenberg, "Number chasers" fall into four personality types:

--"Procrastinators" enter their forties and fifties ensconced in a cloud of avoidance and denial about the years ahead of them, or simply do not understand investing in their futures.

--"Pluckers" often lazily or arrogantly pull ephemeral, albeit specific, Numbers from thin air with little attention to developing a realistic and coherent plan to achieve their goals.

--"Plotters" crunch every practical aspect of their financial history, hoping to cement their Number in black and white, even at the expense of not having fun and leisure.

--"Probers" visualize their Numbers not as an end but as the means to pursuing dreams and passions, and completing inner and outer journeys to self-fulfillment.

* The current "Debt Warp" is the "silent Number killer that afflicts young and old" that has been brought on by our "whip-it-out credit-card culture."

* The "Lost Years" describes a person's 20s, 30s, and 40s wherein sensible financial foundation-building bows to oblivious and careless spending, and the tug-of-war dichotomy between the "old Rest of Your Life" and the "new Rest of Your Life."

* A surprise "Lifestyle Relapse" attack around retirement age can be induced by debt, aging, long term care, and self-absorption. Living longer and spending more, people will eventually experience dire consequences in response to the debt-drenched, expense account-driven lifestyles to which they have grown accustomed.

* The six tenets of the "Eisenberg Uncertainty Principles" outline the dubious state of living in a carpe diem-addicted, indebted culture with little financial guidance or responsibility.

* "Downshifting" is an important skill one needs to know how to do in the expanse between leaving a career and before death in order to maintain financial stability and a happy life.

Eisenberg's book is not an investment guide, but rather something wholly original: a revealing look behind our most common financial and emotional conflicts and how we can begin to get a grip on them. Eisenberg gives each reader a unique and unprecedented tool with which to virtually craft his or her future. This encompassing book is a priceless, step-by-step prelude to initiating, or continuing, discussions with a qualified financial advisor. The bottom line for The Number is that Eisenberg offers each reader a fresh and promising beginning to the rest of his or her life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #307198 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-03
• Released on: 2006-01-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743270311
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Thinking about retirement is as pleasant as a colonoscopy. Not in Lee Eisenberg's hands, however. He has written a funny and wise book about how to think about your future but also, and more important, how to think about life."

--Ken Auletta, author of Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbable Empire

Review
"There are precious few works that deal with the central issues of existence--life, death, and money--with this much elegance and wit. This amusing, essential book succeeds in tapping into the dreams and schemes of an entire generation who learned how to hang out and do very little in the 60s--and would now like to hang out and do very little in its 60s. Back then we were listening to Hendrix. Today we're tuned into Eisenberg."

--Stanley Bing, author of Sun Tzu Was a Sissy: Conquer Your Enemies, Promote Your Friends, and Wage the Real Art of War

"Lee Eisenberg has somehow found the sweet spot when it comes to 'financial planning' and, indeed, life. I started to read this book to write an endorsement, and ended up using it as a personal guide to my future. Yikes!"

--Tom Peters, author of Re-Imagine! and In Search of Excellence

"Thinking about retirement is as pleasant as a colonoscopy. Not in Lee Eisenberg's hands, however. He has written a funny and wise book about how to think about your future but also, and more important, how to think about life."

--Ken Auletta, author of Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbable Empire

Customer Reviews

Intriguing but unpractical
The book is very well written, easy to read, informative, yet really unpractical. The author is bent on rendering a not so complex issue really Byzantine. The amount of money you need to retire so your lifespan does not exceed the one of your retirement portfolio is not that complicated of an issue. Let's say you want to retire on $100,000 a year. Assuming that you and your spouse will pull $30,000 a year from Social Security, and $20,000 a year from old defined benefit pension plans; you have a gap of $50,000. As a short cut, you can use the Dividend Discount Model to value stock. Using a conservative after tax investment return of 7.5% and a long term inflation rate of 2.5%, by dividing $50,000 by (7.5% - 2.5%) you need $1,000,000 in your own retirement funds (401K, IRAs) to retire. In reality, you need a bit less because the Dividend Discount Model assumes you live forever.

However, the author ponders on the above number for over 250 pages. What if the Social Security system is semi-privatized as the Bush administration is talking about? If you are over 55, the current system is grandfathered. Given Bush momentum, Social Security reform as of now is not forthcoming anyway. How about if your employer goes bust, and your pension evaporates. Depending on who is your employer this may be an unlikely outcome. Otherwise, the Government picks up the tab and typically pays you at least 50 to 75 cents on the dollar. If this is a concern, use just 50% to 75% of your expected pension income in the calculation mentioned above. The author mentions other complications including the fallacy of using average returns in your calculations and instead using Monte Carlo simulation method. Now some mutual fund companies have included Monte Carlo engines within their retirement advice section of their websites. This is however not for the faint of heart from a quantitative standpoint. A nifty short cut around it, is to use different scenarios with overly conservative investment returns (within the calculation shown in above paragraph) to explore some "what if" worst cases.

The author has also a very strange idea of what the middle class is. He clearly confuses the Easterners top deciles with annual income over $200,000, net worth in the millions, and very self-actualized and successful careers with what the middle class really is. Well, people like that really don't have to worry much about the numbers. For the author and this group, it is pretty easy to say retirement planning is a lot more than just about the numbers.

If you want practical advice on retirement planning and investing, let me recommend a far superior book: "The Random Walk Guide to Investing" by Burton G. Malkiel.

What's Your Number?
Eisenberg's premise in "The Number" is at first blush sound. He defines "the number" simply as "How much money do you need to secure the rest of your life?" Focused squarely on the Baby Boomer generation, although the dust jacket expands the audience to include "...every man and woman over thirty," the reader becomes acutely aware of a looming financial crux. With unsustainable spending rates and little or no preparation for retirement, many Baby Boomers find themselves at the crossroads of their retirement woefully unprepared and asking the question just how much is really enough. The concept of condensing retirement simply to "the number" is intriguing, but unpractical as a financial solution.

Fortunately, "The Number" reads well and quick. Delivered in three parts (Chasing It, Figuring It, and Finding It) through 17 chapters, "The Number" tries grappling with a nearly insurmountable topic and one that is hard-tested by even suggesting a rote method of dealing with it. Indeed, it is not until the reader reaches page 156 that the author advises "developing a realistic lifetime income plan" as a potential solution! In very next chapter, however, Eisenberg dully provides the reader with the flip side of the coin. The reader is indulged with a protracted discourse into the theory that perhaps, just maybe, the oft-termed "number" is not numerical dollars, but rather "...meaning, fulfillment, and life's true calling?"

The author's use of selective statistics is superb. Consider:

"Of workers fifty-five and older, only one in four has invested assets of more than $100,000; one in three has less than $50,000."

"1 percent of the population--nearly three million people--currently has as much money as the hundred million people at the bottom of the ramp."

"...one of every 125 Americans is today a true millionaire..."

"Roughly 80 percent of those eligible do indeed put some money into a 401(k) plan--typically 5 to 6 percent of their pay."

The statistics are eye-opening and woven seamlessly into Eisenberg's work--but why not cite them with the appropriate source to add further credibility to their substance?

In addition to the total lack of citations on the statistics, the author probably should have partnered with several respected Financial Advisors to contribute or even co-author the book. I had trouble putting credence in the author's qualifications to write a work so many Boomers will probably take as financial advice verbatim. Barring his generational fit and Rolodex of peers, this is a tough sell if the reader is looking for practical, no-kidding experience from the field. On a marketing and sales standpoint, however, this book IS a phenomenon and perhaps the author primarily wanted to bring to light, in the form of this work, discourse on what he considers one of the least talked-about subjects for the Baby Boomers. If that is the case, then this book has indeed succeeded. It brings to light the many assumptions, conflicts, and unspoken conversations about the unique challenges each Boomer is faced with when developing a very personal "number." Well marketed!

Disappointing and Negative
I picked up The Number hoping for some practical tips--maybe formulas and exercises to help me plan for the future. But halfway into the book, I was so depressed I could barely muster the energy to turn the page.

People with many millions more than me are worried to death that they don't have enough for retirement. And here I was thinking we were pretty well prepared to retire comfortably.

Clearly, I'm completely out of touch--or else Eisenberg is.

Eisenberg's world is downright unpleasant--he says people are more willing to talk about what kinds of animals they are, uh, cozying up to than they are to talk about how much is in their retirement savings. All the top-earners he writes about either support mistresses, or would be suicidal to have to give up their Paris chateaus in retirement. And, he says, there are only four types of people when it comes to retirement planning--all of them hopelessly naive or stupid.

He goes on in fine Chicken Little style (he is a journalist, after all) to tell us how unprepared baby boomers are to retire, how unprepared everyone is. This is helping me how?

In fairness to Eisenberg, I'll admit that I didn't read to the end. Maybe it gets a lot better in the last 50 pages. But just as I wouldn't sit and listen to someone's narcissistic complaining for hours on end, I just couldn't hold out long enough to get to whatever reward might be at the end of this book.

This book appears to be selling well--and maybe that was the point. Although I'm no better off for buying it, at least Eisenberg is closer to his Number.