WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?
Lee Eisenberg held
several key leadership roles in both media and marketing-based
companies, including editor-in-chief of
Esquire magazine
and Chief Creative and Administrative Officer for Land’s End. In 2004,
he left the corporate world behind to work on his most recent project, a
New York Times bestselling book entitled The Number,
released on January 3, 2006. He joined The Investing
Revolution that week to discuss his work. Excerpts from
his interview
are included below.
Jim Whiddon:
Lee, welcome to the program. The new book is entitled The Number.
The obvious first question is, “What is ‘the number’?”
Lee Eisenberg:
The Number, to put it most briefly, is how much money we think we need
in order to feel secure about the rest of our life, how much money we need to
fund retirement and presumably to underwrite our quest for meaning and
contentment over the next two or three decades.
JW:
What made you decide to write this particular book?
LE:
Well, I was wrestling with what my number should be, as are probably 77
million other baby boomers these days. When I left Land’s End, I thought that
I had enough money to be sort of comfortable, but I wasn’t totally sure. So I
had to confront, really for the first time in my life, some hard questions:
Did we have enough? How much was enough to allay anxieties and take on the
risks that the next decades are bound to present? So I started thinking about
this myself, started asking other people about this question of “Do you know
what your number is?” I found that a lot of people, while they’re thinking
about these questions, are having trouble talking about it. In many ways what
one’s number is, or should be, is sort of the last taboo. People talk very
freely, but very few of us are willing to talk about what we may have [or
need] in the bank, even to our spouses.
Lance Alston:
This book spends very little time talking about investing. Why is that?
LE:
It is not a book that was intended to tell people how to invest. The social,
cultural and psychological aspects of feeling secure financially were what I
thought I was doing when I first started my research. But the more I talked to
people and the more I thought about it, I realized there’s really a two-part
equation here. Yes, it has to do with money and yes, we’re always asking
ourselves how much we need, but maybe the real story was not so much how much
we need, but what we need it for. It’s only until we begin to answer some
tough questions about what will make us happy that can we really sit down and
presume to do a good financial plan to fund that happiness. So the book is, if
you will, a guided tour or journey through where we are right now in the
culture when it comes to both financial security and also emotional
satisfaction.
JW:
You tell us in the book that everyone fears what you call “lifestyle relapse.”
Why don’t you explain that idea to our listeners?
LE:
Lifestyle relapse is simply my way of saying that buried in everybody’s
psyche, and not very deep down, is the concern that we will either run out of
money or our money will begin dwindle so precipitously that we will not be
able to live the standard of living that a lot of baby boomers always assumed
was their birthright. We were told from the day we were born that we would
live better than our parents and the American dream would simply get better
and better. And up until four or five or six years ago, I think there was
every reason to believe that was true. However, I think we feel a bit
differently now. I think there’s a bunch of clouds in the sky that weren’t
there five or six years ago. Some of them have to do with world events beyond
our control. A lot of them have to do with how the economy and the markets
have changed over the last five or six years. So a lot of people are worrying
more and more about whether or not their presumed standard of living is going
to hold up over the course of the next 20 or 30 years. Lifestyle relapse is
this scary ghost that lives in our heads from day to day and a lot of people,
rather than confronting it and putting a financial plan in place that might
protect their lifestyle, basically go into an avoidance mode that renders them
somewhat immobilized when it comes to doing the right things with a qualified
financial planner.
LA:
Lee, you have a quote in your book that really grabbed our attention, “An
examined life almost always costs a lot less than an unexamined one.” Can you
tell us a little about that?
LE:
I think in the end, that’s the point to which the whole book, really, is
written. The more we think about what we want and the more we think about
what’s really important to us in the end, the far better we are prepared to
actually put a financial plan in place. When you finally do ask yourself
what’s really important, the answers most of us give tend to be along similar
lines. We want to find a creative channel. We want to try to do meaningful
things on behalf of whatever we believe in, a church, or the planet, our
neighborhood, a school. We want to study foreign languages. We want to reach
better relationships with people we really love. Those are the things, in the
end, that people want out of the rest of their life. Not one of those I just
listed is expensive. And it may well be that if you examine your life a bit
more rigorously, you may find, ironically and happily, that you may need a lot
less money than you think you need.
JW:
If you were made king for one day, what would you do to make finding “the
number” easier for all Americans?
LE:
I would suggest that the media and financial planners do a better job in
marrying the relationship between the materials side and the meaning side. If
you look at all the books in the bookstores, all the armchair millionaire
books, they don’t really cut to the soul. They’re only part of the equation.
So if I could do anything, I would probably try to raise the level of
discussion so that when we are talking about money, we’re also talking about
meaning. We live in an incredibly materialistic, financially driven society.
But oddly enough, people don’t particularly have much of a competency in
dealing with it. People are always making ill-considered decisions. I think
that happens because we’re not relating money to some other questions about
our life. We’re dealing with it almost unto itself and money is so ubiquitous
and so important that we almost take it for granted and don’t even ask
ourselves what it’s for. So I would try to raise the level of discourse and
try to get a lot of the writers and commentators about money to be much more
thoughtful about what it really means in our lives.
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