No one ever plans to fail, they just fail to plan.  Every retired person who is working as a WalMart greeter said the same thing you are saying now when they were 29.  They all felt that retirement was a long time away.  Your 29 today but tomorrow you will wake up and be 40.  Then it will be much tougher to save enough money to retire.  No one can tell you exactly how much you will need but a good rule of thumb is you will need at least 75% of what you make now to have the same lifestyle you have now.  So if you make 40k a year now you will need at least 30k a year in todays dollars to retire.  But you have to adjust that amount for inflation.  That means you will need about 70k a year in retirement and that's just to keep your same lifestyle.  Unfortunately social security will not be around by the time you are 65, at least not in the form that exists today so you will need a nest egg of somewhere around a million dollars to be able to live off the interest at a safe 5-6%.  To get there in the next 35 years you will need to invest about $300 per month at a 10% return each year.  A good place to start is to see if your employer has a 401k or other retirement plan.     

salije wrote:

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Hey wildbill, that all sounds great but I have 2 questions.  With the stock market tanking daily where is a person supposed to invest to get a 10% return and just where are we supposed to find the money to invest, you might have noticed the economy bites right now and I'm just trying to survive and pay my bills. 

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You are right, the economy is bad, but that doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities.  Finding the money to invest can be a challenge if you are in debt, but your debts are not only part of the problem, they can also be part of the solution.  Getting out of debt will free up money to invest.  The money you are paying in interest to your creditors is money you should be using to build your wealth, not theirs.  Your debts are also one of the very best places to invest right now.  Every extra dollar you pay on the principal, receives a return equal to the interest rate on the debt.  If your credit card charges 25% interest, every dollar you pay on principal, is in effect, getting a guaranteed 25% return.  Try doing that right now on Wall Street.  So, investing in your debts kills 2 birds with one stone...it frees up future income so you can save and invest, and it produces a high rate of return.  Every dollar you pay on principal also immediately increases your net worth by the same amount.