The Number Review: Final Thoughts

March 21st, 2008

This is the fifth and final installment of a 5 part review of Lee Eisenberg’s The Number. The first installment can be found here, the second installment here, the third installment here, and the fourth installment here. The reviews appear every Friday afternoon.

So now we’ve finished The Number, and what have we learned? For those who, like me, were expecting to make some sort of number calculation at some point, the appendix does indeed have a formula to do a quick and dirty calculation of your personal “number”, based on the 4% rule with some more fine tuning, but encourages you not to use it. Centering your calculations around income and not around what you actually plan to and aspire to do is not going to give you a good picture. Ask yourself - what is it you want to do, accomplish, be? Examine your life, and decide based on that.

Which, really, has been the overall message of the book. There isn’t a magic formula or a simple calculation that tells you what you need for the rest of your life. You need to examine what is important to you,what you want out of your retirement, what your goals and dreams and hopes are. Then you can make strides towards meeting those goals through financial security.

Although I enjoyed the book as a whole in its style and conversational tone, I found it more than a a little unsatisfying by the end. I was expecting more meat and less theory, I think. I also thought it was really geared towards those in the upper 10% or maybe even 1% of income. This wasn’t apparent to me from reading the cover, but there was a sort of tone throughout the book to me in that regard. Which is a valid audience to aim at, I just wish I had known about the target audience before I started reading. The book did have some cleverly packaged ideas I found interesting and amusing, but as a whole, if you’re looking for solid retirement advice, for me this isn’t where to find it. If you are looking for someone to scare you into starting to plan for retirement though, you hopefully would get that out of this book. I found the first section the best, for me, and the third section wasn’t in my eyes really geared towards me at all.

I am still deciding on the next book I am going to look at, I have a few now sitting on my shelf, either promotional copies I was sent or ones I won in contests. I am going to read the beginning of a few over the next week and see what I come up with. They look promising though. And hopefully relevant!