Welcome back to Marvelous Money! We appear to have taken a bit of a summer hiatus, but we’ll just call that time to let the first seven posts sink in. (Missed one? You can find them all here.) So far we’ve covered emergency funds, managing joint finances, building a budget, and yes, how to spend money :) Now, it’s time to talk retirement. Before we get into the nitty gritty, though, I thought it might be worthwhile to spend a bit of time on the WHY. Or, perhaps more importantly, the why NOW. Because yes, everyone knows that theoretically they should be saving for retirement. But are you? I’m betting that if you see the reality of what starting now versus starting in ten years means for your future, you will indeed be motivated to take action. If you’re reading this in your twenties or thirties, you have an insane amount of power in your hand, and it’s called compound interest. Let’s look at a few numbers. Let’s say you start saving for retirement at age 25. You put away $125 a month, and you earn an 8% average every year (around the average annual historical return of a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds). After 40 years, at age 65, you have about $439k. Marvelous! Now, let’s say you start saving $125 ten years later, at age 35, with the same return. At 65, you have about $187k. Let’s go one step further, starting at age 45 and saving $125 a month. At 65, you’ll have just $74k. Yipes! Obviously, if you start saving later in life, you’d probably save more per month — if you can. But WE want to make our money work for us, don’t we? And I don’t know about you, but I think the