Behind
The
Number
How nagging fears of a destitute retirement led this
"downshifter" to rethink his life
By Lee Eisenberg
MOST OF US APPROACH retirement planning in
one of two ways. Some of us, not many, make
like the Little Red Hen: We run and rerun the
numbers, weigh the myriad risks of inflation
and projected market returns, and put contingencies in place to finance longer-than-expected lives. The rest of us play financial chicken.
Procrastinators to the max, we plant precious little grain, even
though we know the second half requires a great deal of bread.
Me, I was one of those procrastinators. Through my 20s, 30s,
and 40s, I contributed to the retirement plan at work; that was
pretty much it. My investment mix was tepid: heavy on bonds, light on stocks -- who could forget Black
Monday? Not once did I seek systematic
counsel from a financial adviser; I had no
detailed road map to the future. Then,
seven years ago, things took a turn. At the
time my wife and I -- 46 and 52, respectively -- and our two kids (still in grade
school) were leading the sort of life we'd
convinced ourselves we wanted. We were
downshifting, as it's trendily called these
days. We lived in a nice enough house in
Westchester County, just 30 minutes
from Grand Central. Three days a week I
rode the train into Manhattan, where I
had a pleasant, if not especially remunerative, consulting deal at Time Inc. The
other days I played bad golf with retirees
who were a good 20 years my senior.
Could I afford this mellow middle passage? Who knew? Every now and then a
pang hit, such as whenever I wrote out a
fat property tax check. Or when the
slightest intimation of mortality -- was
that a flicker of heartburn or the onset of
a full-fledged cardiac infarction? -- foretold the prospect of financial unraveling
or worse. One Zantac and five minutes
later, however, and I was downshifting
again at the driving range.
Those intermittent pangs melded into
a giant Pang Attack one gray January afternoon. The phone rang. It was a job offer. The caller was the vice-chairman of
Lands' End, then a $2 billion public company. Unaware that my ad hoc master
plan called for three decades of semi-
retirement, he asked if I'd have any interest in overseeing the company's creative
and marketing operations -- report to the
ceo, be a corporate big shot. A magazine
fan, he explained that the Lands' End catalogs needed more sizzle, the kind of cover stories and features you'd more likely
find in national magazines than a clothing catalog. The job, he said, carried a
generous salary and bonus, plus stock options, the grain of choice in the late 1990s.
Lands' End, he said, was no flash in the pan. Unlike the eToys of the brave new e-world, the company had actual customers -- 10 million of them, all comfortable ordering by phone and soon,
presumably, via computer. There was a
powerful culture in place and a loyal
workforce that delivered the goods with
unfailing efficiency and friendliness. Finally, the vice-chairman said, trying to set
my boxer briefs on fire, Lands' End was
solidly profitable, with a squeaky clean
balance sheet. I was already halfway
hooked, no matter that it all sounded like
a job and a half and that I couldn't just
phone it in. Lands' End, he reminded me
at the end of the conversation, was based in tiny Dodgeville, Wisc. The deal, non-negotiable, was that we'd have to drag
kids, dog, and middle-aged bones all the
way to Badgerland.
On the train ride
home that evening, I
weighed the pros and
cons. Actually, there
were so many cons I
never made it to the
pros
and
nearly
missed
my
stop.
Downshifting? Forget
about it. Aging parents? Friends? They'd
be far, far away. Our kids? They were happily settled -- why
mess with their heads? Wisconsin kids
would all be hulking, fair-haired, hockey-playing Vikings. Our kids, on the other
hand, displayed no incipient fondness for
herring or dogsledding.
Trudging up the hill from the station, I
finally got to some pros. The job carried
lots of responsibility. It was a chance to
revitalize an admired brand. Then the
pangs hit hot and heavy. The image of
me, in a nursing home, no one to swab
my chin. My wife, a destitute widow. The
kids, scrounging for tuition. Could we
possibly turn down a promise of grain,
which, if planted diligently, would make
all the difference 10, 20, 30 years from
now when our geriatric chickens came
home to roost?
WELCOME TO DODGEVILLE
so we flew to Wisconsin for a look-see,
goose-down parkas zipped to our chins.
Without much fuss, I took the job. Upshifting furiously, we said goodbye to
family and friends, collected our dental
records, and found a house on the edge of
Madison, a breezy commute across the
tundra to Dodgeville (pop. 3,042, not
counting cows). Aging parents? We did
what we could, eventually relocating my
wife's mother to Wisconsin. Friends? We
got back to New York now and then. The
kids? They met a few Vikings their own
size, and all was fine.
And the job? Rewarding in every
sense. It was a revelation, an inspiration,
to work side by side with hundreds of
people, from farm wives in the call center
to copywriters late of the big city, who
were all tethered to a single value: take
care of the customer, and everything else
(revenues, profits, job satisfaction) would
take care of itself. Everything clicked. The
company enjoyed a couple of record-breaking years. Then Lands' End was
bought by Sears.
Financially, if not culturally, it was a great deal. But things
were no longer the
same -- endless meetings, paralysis by
analysis. Five years
into the adventure we
decided it was time to
move on. We'd keep
the kids in school, stay
in the Midwest, but
open a new chapter.
But what about
those pangs? Would
hey return? In search of a clue, my wife
and I sat down with a financial adviser,
who later brought back pie charts and
gave us a qualified thumbs-up. There'd be
no fractional jets or houses for every season. But he showed how we could live in
relative security: healthcare and tuition
costs covered, a sufficient standard of
travel and leisure for the decades ahead.
WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?
For a month or two I took it easy.
Then the pangs returned, milder than before, but definitely back. Why? I decided
to write a book about why. For a couple of
years I toured the country, asking men
and women in their 40s and 50s, Little Red Hens and procrastinators alike,
about their own pangs. I asked if they
knew what their Numbers were --how
much would it take for them to feel confident. I asked what compromises or sacrifices they were prepared to make if those
Numbers fell short. I asked if they had pie
charts, or did they simply navigate by the
moon and stars, hoping for the best, as I'd
done all those years.
Most people had trouble talking about
these things. It was complicated, we
agreed. Eventually I came to realize --
duh -- that money, while central to the
pangs we talked about, wasn't the whole
story. We aren't just fretting over how
much, we're likewise groping at what for.
We all wanted more time, more money,
but for what? Spreading mulch? Endless
rounds of hooks and shanks?
By the time the book was finished I had
learned something that I should have
known seven years ago: that I was kidding myself back in that New York suburb. While "downshifting" was a nice
way to put it, I was really just coasting,
committed neither to work nor to some
personal passion. Those pangs? They
were about money, yes, but they were also
early warning signs of advancing uselessness. The move to Wisconsin was as
much an engagement play as a financial
one. Whenever I get busy, it turns out,
those pangs are gone.