I ask Mike the Architect if he and his wife have a financial plan to cope with their New Number—far fewer than half of Americans have a financial plan, which is a good thing to have when wrestling with either the Old Number or the New Number. “Yes, we do have a financial plan,” Mike says. “To be honest, it’s more like a sketch than a plan. Let’s just say that if an architectural plan I gave a client was anything like our financial plan, the building would fall down.”

Help!

Back when I was interviewing people about their Old Numbers, I was struck by how few wanted to talk specifically about what it would take to feel secure over the long haul. They opened up about sexual fantasies. They rattled on about the drugs in their medicine cabinet. They fessed up to nips and tucks. But as for whether they’d saved enough for the future to retire or quit their current job, they wouldn’t talk. The Number was the last taboo. If they talked about it at all, it was with a financial adviser, assuming they had one. Of those who did, more than a few had lousy ones—and not just those latchkey, so-called money managers who passed along their clients’ fortunes to Madoff. There are plenty of garden-variety financial advisers out there who mismanage nest eggs the old-fashioned way, by churning assets, selling questionable annuities to their clients, and recommending lopsided portfolio allocations stuffed with high-fee mutual funds and exotic financial instruments that nobody understands.

But there are also reputable and wise financial advisers out there, so I checked with a few whom I had gotten to know while researching my book. They tell me it’s a reasonably good time to be a financial adviser if you get paid by the hour or take a percentage of assets under management, but not if you depend on commissions. They tell me their phones have been ringing off the hook—hands to hold, spreadsheets to rerun. Old Numbers need to be revisited or scrapped. “If I can’t retire now, then when? If I can’t tell the boss to shove it tomorrow, then when?” And there are New Numbers to be addressed from the ground up: “How long do we have? What’s the worst that can happen?”

Jonathan Smith, a managing partner of a firm in Greensboro, North Carolina, tells me about the questions he was asked during two recent phone calls, typical of many: “What are you doing with my money so I won’t lose a lifetime of savings?” and “Am I broke yet?”

Dan Danford runs the Family Investment Center in St. Joseph, Missouri. He says that older clients—boomers and up—are jumpy if not altogether panicked, assuming they’re reasonably well diversified and not overleveraged. Gray hairs at least have the benefit of previous, less calamitous run-throughs: inflation in the 1970s, Black Monday, the internet bubble.

Steve Smith runs an advisory practice outside Denver. He says he tries to get clients to look for a silver lining amid the current calamity. He sees a glimmer of a “back-to-the-future economy” taking shape now, wherein those on the edge of lifestyle relapse—jobless or soon-to-be jobless bankers, autoworkers, newspaper reporters, and millions of others—may find gainful employment and solace through entrepreneurialism. Bad times are not a bad time to start your own business, Smith says. Rents and the price of equipment are low; employees are there for the asking, their demands modest; putative competition is in a weakened state. (Okay, maybe that’s a tin lining.)

My final call is to George Kinder, who had a feature role in the book I wrote. Kinder is a financial adviser, yes, but an unusual character: a Harvard-educated classics scholar, a seeker of enlightenment through meditative practice. He runs an enterprise called the Kinder Institute, which is dedicated to teaching other financial advisers (who then try to teach us miscreants) how to close the gap between money and meaning, between money and fulfillment. That may sound New Agey, but those issues are relevant today: How do you buy a ticket to freedom if you’re as poor and screwed as that letter from your money-management firm said?

Kinder is 60, the father of young twins, and has a lifestyle that would seem especially vulnerable to significant relapse: He has a house in Hawaii and another on a tranquil pond near Boston. He claims a strong spiritual connection to both places. I ask him how worried he is about his own financial situation. Kinder says that, yes, he’s concerned, but he believes his family is reasonably “weatherproofed” by two layers of protection, one financial, the other—well, I’ll get to it.

Financially, he says, he is staying the course, not selling into the down market, hanging in there. He cites one of the few universal truths about how to lessen the odds that you will run out of money before you die: If you’re somewhere around Kinder’s age, reasonably diversified (60 percent stocks, 40 percent bonds, give or take), and you don’t draw down more than 4 or 5 percent a year, then 80 years of historical market returns indicate that there’s almost no chance that you’ll outlive your nest egg.

But what if history doesn’t apply? I ask him. What if it’s worse this time? Here’s where Kinder’s second layer of protection comes in.

“If necessary,” he says, “I’ll sell one or even both of our homes. We’ll do what we must. Keep in mind, the issue is freedom, not freedom to spend. But unless we think hard about what freedom means to each of us—and it varies from person to ­person—we default to the idea that freedom is the life Angelina and Brad can afford but we can’t. Why? Because we’ve been taken in by false images of what freedom looks like”—meaning, I presume, those retire rich! magazine covers.

The bottom line here is that the things that truly matter in life do not come with daunting price tags attached. Sure, we all need food, health care, and shelter from the storm. But other than that, we don’t need an especially big Number to buy that which we “can’t live without,” the things that are “bedrock important,” as Kinder says.

Now, to some—Mr. Jackass, for example—Kinder’s self-protection plan sounds squishy and naive. But for others—Mr. Ashamed, B. Prepared, Mike the Architect, perhaps you and me—it may offer a ray of hope. To sell a house we love is no small lifestyle relapse. But if the tradeoff is freedom gained—the opportunity for creative expression, doing good for others, keeping loved ones connected—well, I call that comfort, even if it’s cold comfort, in this, the winter of our discontent.