This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Chris Arnold. When did you first start thinking about saving money and

figuring out how to do that the right way for retirement? Okay, so in the crib, I asked for

bottle of milk and a 401k. That's Michelle Singletary. She's got a personal finance column for

the Washington Post and we love to have her on Life Kit just because she's awesome. And Michelle says

that when it comes to setting yourself up for retirement, some people are just kind of born to do

this. They just get it. If you have a parent, you take your kids to swim class for the first time.

There's some kids who just just jump in and it looked like they came out the womb knowing how to

swim and those who just laughing around and those who just standing on the edge thinking you

and not getting me in this water at all. And I was the first kid. Okay, so maybe when it comes to

retirement, you're still kind of at the edge of the pool dipping your toe in. It's like, oh no,

this is the deep end. There's all this stuff I don't understand. That's okay. Michelle wants you to

jump into the retirement savings pool because there's just so much to gain if you do it. And especially

if you do it when you're still young. So you know, one of the questions that people often ask financial

experts or finances is how do I become rich? Like what? They think there's some sort of secret to it

that there's a stock that they don't know about or a mutual fund or you know, there's a secret path

that rich people are keeping from us. But if you're young, here's the secret. You ready? You're young.

That is your advantage. That is your secret stock.

This episode of Life Kit, retirement savings 101. We're going to help you understand why you need

to start investing for retirement now, how to pick the right accounts and how to manage the money right.

So like we were just talking about with Michelle, it's really important to start saving for

retirement as early as possible. And that's because of the magic of what's called compound interest,

which sounds like, oh my god, that's really boring. But actually, it really is magic.

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