The New Commonsense Guide to Your 401(k): Rebuilding Your Portfolio From The Bottom up

Part III. HOW TO GET IN AND GET OUT

Contributing to Your 401(k) Account

You should enroll in your company's 401(k) plan. Period. But what if you're twenty-five years old and this is the first time you've had two nickels to rub together? Saving for retirement is boring. I asked a nineteen-year-old college freshman what he thinks about retirement. "Well I try not to think too much on it," he said. "But if I had to I would think about saving some money. I can't depend on anyone else to support me when I'm old." This college freshman happens to be my son, Tom. He likely would not know as much about saving and investing if his parents weren't financial journalists, yet young people today are more aware than their parents were that no one is going to support them in retirement.

But forget about retirement for a moment. Think about your life. Think about your dreams. What do you want to accomplish in your career? In your financial life? In her regular Wall Street Journal column, "Work & Family," Sue Shellenbarger wrote in June 2009 that our kids will need to be much more creative and adaptable in their careers than we were. "The recession is driving home a bitter truth about the 21st century job market," she wrote. "A tidy, linear path to a secure career is increasingly hard to find." So young people must learn to be entrepreneurial; they must learn to look for new opportunities.^[5]

One important ingredient in reaching career goals is to put some money aside. There's no simpler way to save ...