Starting early is only half the battle. The other half is the rate of return. If you start up a retirement account at age 17 with $2000 in it, but you just pu

Starting early is only half the battle. The other half is the rate of return. If you start up a retirement account at age 17 with $2000 in it, but you just put it in a generic savings account, by age 37 you'll have . . . $2209. People encouraging you to save often give unrealistically high rates of return. 12% is unrealistic for any investment vehicle I know of (though people sometimes say it for the stock market -- but they're crazy optimistic). Here's a spreadsheet to show you the impact of both rate of return and time: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqTfjQUnJdLkdFl2eGJhdmpoaF9fM2ZmNmJZNjJGcmc https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqTfjQUnJdLkdFl...