The Number: What Do You Need for the Rest of Your Life, and What Will It Cost?

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 is the audiobook to listen to before you consult an investment adviser or a retirement guide — and above all, before the rest of your life slips by, unexamined.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"[Eisenberg] has a deft way of making abstract financial principles both personal and funny. His book will definitely make you think about where you're going and why." MoneySense

"An important book, one that illuminates the appalling mistakes that many baby boomers are making as they approach later life." Wall Street Journal

"Today's hottest personal finance book is Lee Eisenberg's The Number...read The Number, think about the Number." Dallas Morning News

"[Eisenberg's] tips are timely for millions of baby boomers who are hurtling toward retirement with little sense of what they want from it or how they'll get along once they no longer bring home a paycheck." Hartford Courant

Do you know what your "number" is? It's the amount you need for your nest egg. Have you saved enough? Can you save enough? The Number offers an intriguing and entertaining tour — of wealth gurus, life coaches, and financial advisers, and our hopes and fears for the future — to explore the secrets of the Number. The result is a provocative field guide to your psyche and finances, and an urgently useful book for anyone over thirty. The Number will help you think about the kind of life you want, and the kind of help you need to achieve it.

Eisenberg is former editor-in-chief of Esquire.