Basically it’s just invest consistently over a long period and for all purposes forget about the money (or at least consider it in your mind to be beyond use).

Basically it’s just invest consistently over a long period and for all purposes forget about the money (or at least consider it in your mind to be beyond use). An index fund is as close as investing gets to a savings account. It’s not a savings account, and will go down if the market does - but the logic is that unless you think it’s the end of the world then it will recover. So you just play the long game and end up retired comfortably (and probably early, depending on when you start and how hard you go at it). Put the 8% you can reasonably expect into a compound return calculator and it’ll give an idea of what to expect. It’s not clairvoyance though - things (good and bad) will happen along the way and the numbers will adjust accordingly from the guesstimate.