Review: The Number by Lee Eisenberg

Let me start by saying that I love to recommend products by nice people. When I contacted Lee Eisenberg to offer to review his new book, The Number, he responded quickly and was very polite. His publishing company was the same. And I received my audio version of The Number in a few days. I wanted so much to love this book -- these were such great people!

Over the next week, I listened to The Number while driving and working out. Here's a summary of the book:

• The Number is about retirement and what you will need to have saved to fund the retirement you want.
• It stresses that most people don't have a definite number in mind, haven't really fully thought through all the issues associated with retirement, and are woefully unprepared for life after work.
• The book also includes everything you want (and don't want) to know about retirement -- the history of retirement, the future of retirement, a fictional family and their retirement issues, real people talking about and dealing with the issue of retirement and on and on. You get the idea -- the book could be aptly titled "All Things about Retirement".
• Eisenberg is very funny and has a dry sense of wit which makes a totally boring topic rather bearable. He has the habit of referring to "financial advisors" as "brokers" which I particularly like. ;-)

As I said, I really wanted to like this book. But I have to be honest -- I didn't. It was long on words and short on practical application. It dealt with a lot of topics that I felt didn't need to be covered (at least in the depth they were discussed). It seemed to me that The Number was a really good 30-page book with a lot of other information/commentary thrown in to be able to call it a book and to justify the price. As a friend of mine said about it, "The only thing I didn't like about the book was that it was the same thing as the magazine article, available for free online, with a little/lot of fluff around it. But other than that, it was alright." Exactly.

My recommendation to you: check it out at the library, read the first 20 pages or so (so it can get you scared enough to take action on this issue), then read the last few pages that tell you how to roughly calculate your retirement number. Supplement this with a few magazine articles or web resources and develop your own plan (or go to a professional to help you). Other than those 30 pages or so, The Number is really not worth your time.

Free Money Finance Rating for The Number on a scale of 0 to 10: 3 Stars.

Free Money Finance books that earn 8 stars or more (not all money related):

• The Millionaire Next Door
• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Your Best Life Now
• The Purpose Driven Life
• Think and Grow Rich
• The Power of Positive Thinking
• Richest Man in Babylon
• The Automatic Millionaire

Update: Here are some additional reviews to consider:

• Lee Eisenberg’s The Number
• Review of The Number by Lee Eisenberg, Part 1
• JLP Reviews Lee Eisenberg’s “The Number”

Comments

[JLP at AllThingsFinancial]

"All Things about Retirement"

Hmmm... for some reason I like that title.

[Jose]

Just reviewed the same book on my blog. Some insightfull information on it.

[Mark]

The book is more about life than it is about retirement, and I think that's the point. That's not something you'll stop to think about if you are too busy driving or working out while listening to it instead of reading it. You were probably expecting another how-to-save-money-to-retire book. It got me thinking about life. And there's no one answer. That makes it complex to have a start and an end to such a subject, all you can do is graze topics. It's up to you to draw your own conclusion, not a conclusion or the book's conclusion, your own conclusion.