Retirement investing is a long-term endeavor. And, as is true with almost anything that takes many years to see results, it's easy to feel like you're not making any progress toward your goal, especially in the early years.
Don't be discouraged. We're about to show you how to shake off those retirement blues with a long-term retirement investing plan that will pay off the closer you get to retirement. How Money Grows In long-term investing, your interest, or your investment growth in the case of mutual funds, compounds over time. The growth of that growth is the secret ingredient for successful retirement investing.
Take a look at this chart. It shows the growth of a mutual fund investor who invests $7,500 a year for 30 years. He's chosen good growth stock mutual funds with a history of great performance, so he will average 12%—the same as the long-term growth rate of the stock market as a whole. His goal is to have $2 million by the time he retires.
Will he meet his goal? 
After 10 years of investing, his balance is a little more than $145,000. He's used up a third of his time, but he's only saved 7% of his goal.
But our investor keeps his nose to the grindstone, and 20 years after he started investing, his balance is almost $625,000. Not bad, but still less than a third of his goal—and he only has 10 years left!
Would you believe he's only four years away from having $1 million?
In the last six years of investing, our example investor's retirement fund will double to $2,206,000! That's the power of compound interest and disciplined investing.
What Does It Mean for Your Retirement? Our example highlights two important facts: - The earlier you begin investing, the better. If our investor only had 20 years until retirement, he could not have reached his $2 million goal without quadrupling the amount he invested each month.
- A solid plan and the commitment to stick to it are essential. Even in the early years when it looked like our investor couldn't possibly reach his goal, he didn't panic. He had a plan he knew would work if he would only stick with it year after year.
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