The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think About the Rest of Your Life [Hardcover]

Lee Eisenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 3, 2006

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.

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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

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

"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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 268 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1st edition (January 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743270312
• ISBN-13: 978-0743270311
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (115 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #629,831 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In addition to the success of his previous book, The Number, Lee Eisenberg has enjoyed a varied and distinguished career on both the creative and business sides in both the publishing and marketing worlds. As editor-in-chief of Esquire, he led the magazine to numerous national awards in diverse categories such as general excellence, reporting, and design.

In 1991, Eisenberg was recruited to be one of six founding partners of the Edison Project, an initiative to design a business and academic plan for a proposed system of world-class schools across the country.

In 1995, he joined Time Inc. where, as editor of strategic development, he helped TIME magazine launch a series of new initiatives, including Time.com; Time for Kids, a weekly newsmagazine for children; special issues on a number of topics, including medicine and art; and The TIME 100, a collaboration with CBS news that chronicled the most influential men and women of the twentieth century.

In 1999, Eisenberg was named executive vice president and creative director at Lands' End, where he oversaw all print and online creative efforts, as well as the company's national advertising, marketing, and public affairs activities.

Eisenberg resigned from Lands' End in 2004 to begin work on The Number, which the Quill Awards cited as one of the best business books of 2006, Business Week named one of the "Top 10 Career Books of 2006," and was winner of a "2007 Books for a Better Life Award." The book earned a place on numerous bestseller lists, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and USA Today. There are now foreign editions of The Number in such far-flung markets as Turkey and Korea.

Since publication of The Number, Eisenberg has been a keynote speaker at dozens of U.S. and international conferences devoted to the emotional and material aspects of financial planning.

In 2006, Eisenberg began work on Shoptimism. The quest included a stint as a clerk at Target, numerous encounters with leading academic and marketing experts, a probe into the brave new world of online chatter, repeated forays into stores of every description, where Eisenberg observed the behavior - rational and otherwise - of strangers, friends, and family members, who kept on shopping through economic good times, then bad.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been a visiting scholar, Eisenberg was one of the founding fathers of Rotisserie League Baseball. He divides his time between Chicago and New York City.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

349 of 385 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing but unpractical January 8, 2006

By Gaetan Lion TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

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.

125 of 140 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars What's Your Number? January 4, 2006

By Scuba Diver

Format:Hardcover

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!

70 of 80 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing and Negative January 22, 2006

By Laura D

Format:Hardcover

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.