text: "The number" poses an interesting question but provides no helpful answers. A four percent draw on invested assets is as much an old wives' tale as a piece of scientific wisdom, even if it is a number. Eisenberg's number is the inverse of that draw down, or twenty-five times.... well, there's the rub, twenty-five times what? income? expenses? income less savings? projected discretionary spending? Post-mortgage payoff and college tuition expenses? The proverbial bottom line is clouded by conversations with an eclectic collection of consultants, experts, philosophers, and casual acquaintances. Eisenberg, a former Esquire editor and short-timer with Lands End, ruminates about a simple question: How much money do you need to feel secure? The problem is that security comes in multiple forms: happiness, comfort, excess consumption, ego. And the accuracy and stability of those measures and outcomes is compounded by key assumptions about how long you will live and how healthy those years will be. Constructing a one-year budget is hard enough. Constructing a thirty-year budget is nearly impossible.
  
  Eisenberg doesn't help his case by the offbeat and idiosyncratic examples and profiles he chooses. Doctors, divorcees, `downshifters', and very little real data shed little light on the real issues. Maybe I knew too much going in. Maybe I expected too much from a few positive references from other sources. In the middle I was confused. By the end I was simply disappointed. And I have my own number, and it changes every day
  