The news today that Merrill Lynch is offloading its mutual fund business in a deal with BlackRock, a money management firm, may on its face have little to do with how you and I choose to invest our pea-sized Numbers.

According to the Wall Street Journal and other reports, the Merrill transaction — merely the latest in a line of fund-industry consolidations and mergers — has to do with a lot of things bigger than everyday, small-time investors: a somewhat tighter regulatory climate (Spitzer’s Revenge); huge outflows of Big Money out of mutual funds into hedge funds; the vast number of mutual funds out there scratching and clawing for market share; and, not incidentally, paltry stock-market returns of the last few years.

But there’s another explanation that indeed may have to do with us, and it’s a heartening one: the Merrill deal may be a sign that small-time players are slowly but surely getting smart — that it isn’t generally necessary to cough up heathy fees to fund managers who have a hard time beating the market, that we’re opting instead for low-cost index funds or exchange traded funds, which operate more or less on autopilot, and are therefore able to get by on teeny tiny fees and transaction costs (John Bogle’s Revenge). In other words, the reorientation of the fund business may be a sign of advancing financial literary on our part — a damn good thing now that we’re personally responsible for the results (and the cost) of our own long-term financial destiny.

I’ve got a piece in the next issue of BusinessWeek (out January 29) that recounts how and why in 1999 we decided to pull up stakes and move from New York to Wisconsin. In addition to the personal reasons described in the story, the BusinessWeek feature explores a couple of lessons learned in the seven years between the time we made the move and the completion of THE NUMBER.

The first lesson is that most of us approach retirement planning in one of two ways. Some of us are like the Little Red Hen: we plant our grain early on, knowing that we’ll need more than one slice of bread over the course of the second-half. The rest of us — including me — choose to play financial chicken with the rest of our lives. We put off real planning and hope for the best.

The BusinessWeek story also raises a few questions about the life passage du jour known as “downshifting,” the transition between fulltime work and all-out retirement, an extended phase that seems to be in cards for most of us these days. As I discuss in the book, downshifting can be a terrific time: you can keep yourself busy and productive, yet also have years to explore passions you never got to indulge when you were running the rat race. Downshifting can be tricky, though. If you’re not careful, as I try to explain in the piece, it can just be a fancy excuse to coast. If you get a chance, check out the magazine and share any thoughts.

THE NUMBER has been out for two weeks now, so I thought I’d give a quick update. I spent last week in New York, making the media rounds. At the center of the week were two successive mornings on the CBS Early Show. The first of these segments was devoted to the book’s Field Guide, which meant that I had to explain — in four minutes, talking like the guy in the old FedEx commercial — the differences among procrastinators, pluckers, plotters, and probers. Day two was mainly about three of the Eisenberg Uncertainty Principles: how the old Rest of Your Life is kaput; how the new Rest of Your Life is befogged; and why the biggest uncertainty of all may be our uncertainty over what money is good for.

There were also a series of radio stops in the Apple, including last weekend’s Motley Fool Radio show; and, most jaw-droppingly, a visit to Bloomberg’s new, eye-popping, beyond-the-Starship Enterprise headquarters on Lexington Avenue. Unbelievable — it shows what a guy (Bloomberg) can do with a Number that approaches the stratosphere. Terminal, baby! I finished the week taping a segment for Nightline, which was aired last night.

Thankfully, there are some encouraging sales to report. This Sunday, THE NUMBER will make its debut on the New York Times extended bestsellers list, one slot shy of making it into the pages of the paper.

Then, in the issue after that, on 1/29, THE NUMBER will indeed show up (#13) on the the Times’ nonfiction bestsellers list. The book also sits at #3 on the Wall Street Journal’s business books list as well as #14 on The Journal’s nonfiction list, and is # 3 on USA Today’s business list, all of which makes me feel better about having bought those new suits for the TV appearances.

As for the next couple of weeks, there will be book signings in Chicago, Madison, and environs, then on to Toronto.

And a piece about our move to Wisconsin, the starting point for the book itself, will be published in Business Week, out in late January.

Thanks sincerely for so many encouraging calls and notes these past weeks.

One of the top business stories of the past week was I.B.M.’s accouncement that in 2008 it would freeze pension benefits for its U.S. employees, and offer no pension at all – just a 401(k) plan – to those joining the company from that point on.

Déjà vu all over again? Sadly, yes.

For several years now, any number of companies have iced their existing pension plans – Hewlett-Packard, Verizon, Sears, to name a few– while others have eliminated their plans outright, and not with a whisper but a bang. Last year, United Airlines’ plan — nearly $10 billion in the red, and covering well over 100,000 employees — crashed and burned, making it the biggest pension default in U.S. history. Last year overall, more than seventy of the nation’s 1,000 largest companies froze or altogether ditched their plans, according to consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide.

So, why the big deal over I.B.M.?

Two reasons, one symbolic, the other sobering.

Big Blue, of course, is the iconic Twentieth Century company, having ushered the world into the computer age through countless innovations in chip technology and information handling. That’s the symbolic part.

The sobering part is that I.B.M. is no wounded department-store chain, or some bizarrely named, amalgamated phone company built on the ashes of the old Baby Bells. I.B.M. – no matter that Bill Gates fleeced it when he was still but a recent college dropout – is today financially solid. But, as The New York Times pointed out, its pension freeze underscores how even healthy companies “no longer want to bear the risk or the expense of providing a firm promise of a lifetime pension.”

That risk falls to you and me, as I explain throughout THE NUMBER, even though no one ever bothered to put out a formal press release so informing us. That the old retirement support systems are dead or dying, and that we’re now (help!) firmly in control of our destiny are, in fact, two of the six Eisenberg Uncertainty Principles defined in the book.

Those Uncertainty Principles are beginning to get an airing now that THE NUMBER is finally available in the stores. Articles about the book, and about the ups and downs about the Old and New Rest of Your Life, are to be found in current issues of TIME, NEWSWEEK, and BUSINESS WEEK.

And, next week, on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, January 11th and 12th, I’ll be popping up on the CBS Early Show, no doubt to talk a bit more about how, when it comes to corporate pensions and the brave new world of self-presevation, baby, it’s cold outside.

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.

New York magazine’s cover story this week is a piece based on some of the ideas you’ll read about in The Number. The article is titled, “Nailing the New York Number.” It discusses what it will take to live happily ever after in the Big Apple – financially and emotionally. There’s reporting in the piece that won’t be found in the book, notably an encounter with a fascinating character named Marvin Tolkin, 79, who is healthy, wealthy, and remarkably wise about what a good Number can do for you and what it can’t.

The piece touches on several of the lessons Marvin learned about what constitutes a happy second-half, many of which, he said, he discovered while observing his father’s retirement. When Irving Tolkin exited his successful apparel company at 62, he didn’t get on a plane and hole up behind shutters in a Fort Lauderdale condo. (A good thing, especially this week, hurricane-wise.) Instead, Irving stayed in New York and did everything the self-help books say a person should. “He became involved at the New School,” Marvin explained to me. “He took up the piano. He painted. And, never having been Bar Mitzvahed, he even learned to daven. But these were all things he did within himself, and they were great, but they weren’t enough,” Marvin went on. “He’d have been much happier had he not overlooked the most important thing of all –the need to be needed.”

This so-called need to be needed, the need to be engaged with others as we journey (or stagger) through old age, strikes most of us young bucks as hopelessly mushy — especially in New York, where you don’t get laughs at dinner parties by revealing a heart on your sleeve. When I told New York friends about my conversations with Marvin, they nodded politely as they signaled for another martini. And yet — I explain this more fully in the book – you can’t achieve anything resembling a coherent financial plan without first figuring out a more difficult calculation: what kind of life do you want when you’re sixty, seventy, eighty, and beyond? Only then can you intelligently start tapping on your calculator keys.

In any event, check out New York magazine on the newsstand. And while you’re standing there, you might as well thumb through Time, which is probably just a few magazines away. Its cover story is “The Great Retirement Ripoff,” a scary accounting of how many companies, aided and abetted by Congress, are screwing millions of old, faithful employees out of promised benefits. The simultaneous publication of these two covers was not lost on the eagle-eyed observers at Gawker.com, an online gossip site based in New York. Gawker ran photos of the two covers under the headline: “We Were Unaware That It Was AARP Media Awareness Week.” As the author of one of the stories, I assure you there was no such conspiracy or, as the Gawkers put it, any attempt at “a friendly kick in the balls from your neighborhood media outlets.”

So, welcome to New York, which is not just a nice place to visit, it also can be — not to be mushy — a fine place to retire, for reasons explained in the story.

This is an unsettling stretch, the time after a manuscript leaves one’s hands and before it surfaces again between two covers. If you are sitting on a work of timely controversy, this is the calm before the storm. For most others — as one cheeky book editor (not mine) likes to say — it’s the calm before the calm. Either way, what’s unsettling is that the world goes on, and your manuscript is in no position to defend itself. In the case of The Number, there could be a huge market crash (not likely, but always possible); or something on the order of a legislative overhaul of Social Security (fat chance).

So far, the biggest news story of the interregnum has been Katrina, and the devastation it has wreaked on poor and rich alike, from society’s most powerless all the way up to Trent Lott. Now that Katrina’s floodwaters are receding, reporters find themselves sifting through rubble in search of story lines that were (deservedly) overlooked in the immediate aftermath. Last week, The New York Times ran a piece about how it’s smart to keep one’s financial records stored on a handy U.S.B. drive, something easily grabbed along with pooch and photo albums in the rush of a panicky escape. The piece reassuringly noted that all you need to do to get ready is spend a few weekend hours gathering and scanning account numbers, legal papers, credit card info, bank statements, insurance policies, and other financial documents you’ll need during reconstruction.

Sound advice. The items listed happen to be the same raw ingredients a decent financial adviser will tell you one needs to work up a comprehensive financial plan for the future — a task, by the way, best undertaken while the sun shines. Yet very few of us ever go to the trouble, in good weather or bad. Preparedness? Brownie, you’re not alone here. We don’t do a heck of a job, either.