My wife and I recently joined another couple for dinner at a small, out-of-the-way Chicago restaurant — brick walls, pinpoint halogen lighting, translucent plastic seating, very Santa Monica. The restaurant was amply packed, serviced by a young and sexy wait staff. The only thing that wasn’t way cool about the place was its clientele: graying couples in their forties, fifties, and sixties, an aging tribe of gourmands who still look to Saturday night as the time to howl. The scene replays itself Saturday after Saturday, year after year, until one day we realize that we’d rather be in bed by eight. Then, it’s early bird specials all the way.

The mid-forties folks we had dinner with are intelligent, prosperous, and extremely content. Jane, the woman across from me, is a stay-at-home mom. She remarked that she really liked this moment in her life – their kids were in good shape, a new house was on the way, all that. Indeed, her only regret, she said, was the she never became a rock star. As for Steve, her husband, he also seemed happy with the way things turned out. He’s a money manager with an office high atop the Loop. From this spectacular perch, he oversees $3-billion worth of client assets, the lion’s share belonging to retirees, or retirees soon to-be. He spends much of his day counseling them on the art and science of cashing out, reassuring them that their two, five, thirty, or hundred-million dollar nest eggs are shock resistant, and won’t crack over the three or four decades remaining.

Midway through the evening, the talk turned to THE NUMBER. Jane mentioned that she liked the book a lot. (With every kind word, she sounded more and more like a rock star to me.) She said the book prompted her to think about two things: whether or not certain of their friends had enough to make it to the end without calamity; and how very little she knows about managing money, even though she has been married for twenty years to someone who knows everything about it. This last point hit a nerve. Steve said that he has been encouraging Jane to think about whom she might turn to for financial guidance should he ever get run over by a pie truck. Lots of people are thinking about the pie truck. Many women have told me that in recent years, and for the first time, they have started to look at monthly financial statements when they arrive in the mail, holding them up to the light as if trying to decode hieroglyphics. They’ve asked after the difference between mutual funds and hedge funds. They read stories in the paper about financial advisers who abscond to sunny islands with millions of other people’s money. And they have started to talk to their spouses about the pie truck.

The reasons for this awakening interest are obvious. As we all know, women, on average, live six years longer than men, though it seems even greater than that. A quick visit to Florida or Arizona would suggest that senior men might qualify for protection under the Endangered Species act. The fact that women live longer means that their assets must be orchestrated carefully to resist the vicissitudes of the market and the headwinds of inflation. Today – even as the baby boom is still spry enough to get out on Saturday nights — about 30 percent of American households ages sixty-five to sixty-nine consist of women without husbands. They make up more than 60 percent of households age eighty-five and up. With the aging of the boom, there will many, many more of them. And yet – surveys report that a huge majority of women, 80 percent, according to one conducted by Prudential, say they are in need of significant assistance when it comes to managing money; over a quarter of them say they know virtually nothing about it.

Why, exactly, is this?

That women aren’t smart enough, or that they’re not good with numbers, is baloney. It’s just that they’ve been enormously time pressed, otherwise engaged with a multitude of responsibilities, including taking care of their own aging parents. In this department alone, care-giving daughters outnumbering missing-in-action sons two to one.

Big financial services companies, brokerages, banks, and advisory firms are all aware of how many billions of dollars will be soon passing into the hands of women. I know a stay-at-home mom in Philadelphia who was recently recruited to serve on a long-term advisory panel set up by PNC bank. Its purpose is to give the bank’s marketing department insight into what products and services women really want, or need. Within a few years, a huge portion of financial advertising will be aimed squarely at women. Remember that Morgan Stanley commercial last year? The one in which a handsome woman of a certain age and her “husband” (we’re supposed to think it’s her husband but it’s really her broker; the “real” husband is snoozing off-camera) are sitting by the water on a lazy afternoon? The “husband” says to the middle-aged woman in a gentle and soothing voice, “You know that summer house you’ve always wanted to build here? Well, I think that with a little portfolio shuffling here and there we just might be able to pull it off sooner than we thought!” The message here is twofold: (1) as far as today goes, even if your flabby husband hasn’t been hit by a pie truck, he might well be asleep at the calculator: and (2) a woman can use a loyal companion, a investment adviser so faithful he deserves to be dragged along even on idyllic lakeside weekends, as if he were some financially astute St. Bernard.

The other day, the Wall Street Journal ran a story that adds fresh evidence to an intriguing trend described in some detail in THE NUMBER: how so-called “life planning” has begun to reshape the language and the practice of traditional financial planning.

Life planners, qualified ones at least, operate out of a set of assumptions quite different from those of traditional financial planners. Qualified life planners aren’t quick to whip out pencil, paper, and start sketching bond ladders. They take the position that you and I need to do some real soul searching, trudge through honest self-examination, before we can work out a conscientious financial plan to guide us to satisfying careers and retirements. A good life planner is one with highly developed listening skills, knows when to talk and when to shut up and, most of all, understands the line between enlightened counseling and playing shrink. Qualified life planners think of themselves as torchbearers who can help us illuminate hidden hopes, dreams, and fears, whatever might be blocking our way to emotional satisfaction and material security. The good ones know where to stop. If they run into serious emotional knots, it’s a trained therapist’s job, not theirs, to unravel them.

Some industry forego the torchbearer metaphor, preferring water sports analogies. They view life planners as snorkelers, people who sould stick to the surface, as opposed to pscyhotherapists, who have the equipment to go deep. The problem, of course, how do you know if a self-proclaimed life planner is content to snorkel, or aspires to scuba, or even can’t swim very well? Life planners, like most financial advisers, aren’t licensed. Others call themselves life planners, or life coaches, and don’t even offer financial advice. All they to do is hang out a shingle, or just add the words to a business card. Then there are the legitimate financial life planners, who are few and far between, qualified financial planners who go off to study at the feet of a small cadre of life planning gurus, some of whom you’ll meet up-close and personal in the pages of THE NUMBER.

In any event, as the Journal piece attests, more and more financial consultants are pulling on their face masks and flippers. Life planning is going mainstream. Such firms as Ameriprise (formerly American Express Financial Advisors), Citigroup, Wachovia, and Smith Barney, among others, are beginning to add life-planning tools to their financial consultants’ client-interaction kits.

The Journal quoted one financial consultant from on such firm, “We need to give clients a sense of security so that they are willing to share with us things they don’t want to tell other people.” She also remarked, “Most of the times, I feel like Barbara Walters.”

The question is, how much training has gone into elevating this woman into the exalted position of bond-laddering confessor? Until you are confident about a life planner’s skills and experience, it’s probably best to keep the details of spousal money fights, fears of career impotency, and raging jealousy about rich friends’ expensive toys, to yourself. Maybe one day somebody will pry these out of your emotional lock box, freeing your spirit to work on a financial plan that will carry you to greater bliss and harmony. And you will be better off for it. But that somebody isn’t going to get you there on just a good Barbara WaWa impersonation.