The Average American Made a Retirement Savings Mistake It's Hard to Come Back from -- But Not Impossible

It's important to save for retirement if you don't want to struggle in your senior years. Social Security can help support you, but most experts recommend replacing at least 80% of pre-retirement income, and these benefits alone will replace only around 40% of what you earned.

Unfortunately, many Americans have already made a retirement savings mistake that is challenging to come back from. That's the bad news. The good news is, it's not impossible to have a secure retirement despite this error. It just takes some extra effort and hard work.

Here's where many people went wrong, along with some details about how to fix it.

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This is the major retirement mistake many Americans make

The retirement mistake many Americans made involves delaying the time when they begin saving for their future.

According to research from Northwestern Mutual, on average, U.S. adults indicate that they started saving for retirement at the age of 31. Unfortunately, that's a fairly late start, as by the time you reach 31, many people have already been in the workforce for a few years and have given up a few years of compound growth that they could have had.

Although 31 is definitely not too late to build a generous nest egg in your retirement plans, the years of missed growth mean that you are going to have to save much more than you would have if you started early. That's because you will have fewer years when your money can work for you.

Say, for example, that you wanted to end up with $1.5 million in your 401(k) or IRA. If that's the case, here's how much you would need to invest throughout your career if you started at 21 (a decade earlier than most people) or at 26 instead of at 31 (assuming retirement at 65 and earning a 10% average annual return).

• If you started at 21, you'd need $191.52 per month to hit your $1.5 million target.
• If you started at 26, you'd need $311.36 per month.
• If you started at 31, you'd need $509.20.

As you can see, that extra decade means you must save a lot more over time. It will cost you over $318 per month from age 31 to age 65 to catch up to where you'd have been if you started a decade sooner.

What can you do to fix it if you're one of them?

If you're one of the many who started investing for retirement in your 30s, or even later, you can still have a secure future. You just need to make sure you're serious about saving. You can use the calculators on Investor.gov to figure out how much to invest each month to hit your retirement goals (which typically should involve saving around 10 times your income).

Once you know how much to invest, set up automatic contributions into your 401(k), IRA, or other tax-advantaged plan ASAP so you don't lose any more time.

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