The standard advice for someone in your situation is, in the short term, to contribute enough to max out your employer match and build up your liquid savings to

The standard advice for someone in your situation is, in the short term, to contribute enough to max out your employer match and build up your liquid savings to cover ~6 months of your personal expenses. After that point, you can ramp up saving your retirement. You're behind where you'd want to be at your age, but there is still plenty of time to fix that. I'll try to get a job that gives me a 401k and figuring out what should I do to make sure my employer matches well. This is just a term in your salary negotiation, though it is probably less flexible than other numbers because they offer the same term in parallel to essentially all employees (by law). It will generally be phrased as "We will match $X with $1 up to Y% of your salary." You prefer lower Xs and higher Ys at the same level of salary, but when comparing between employers, you can just math out how much free money the company is offering per year and treat it as dollar-for-dollar equivalent with salary. After you have ~6 months of living expenses in a liquid emergency fund, you should save substantially more than required to max out your employer match. How much more depends on your situation and goals. In your situation, I'd be shooting for probably 15~20% to set a nice high baseline for myself and burn in new good habits. People find it very difficult to adjust up to that number but if you start saving that much immediately out of every paycheck and don't have your lifestyle creep up to meet your new means, it is much easier. Best of luck!