[fabsroman]

Good for you Ich. Are you planning on heading to college? I would hope so with grades and a class ranking like that.

To hit upon what Rocky said, here are some examples.

Let's assume that you put $4,000 a year into a Roth IRA starting when you are 21 and ending when you are at retirement age at 67. If you get an average rate of return of 7%.

At age 67, that money will be worth $1,227,007.

Now, if you start just one year later it will be worth $1,145,997.

Start 10 years later at age 31 and it will only be worth $552,947.

See what the effect of waiting does. Now, if I were to increase the return rate to say 8% or 9%, the different would be even greater and this money will be tax free since it is in an IRA.

For those of you that own your own business, you can set up Roth IRA's for your kids at a young age. Pay them $4,000 a year for sweeping the floor when they reach age 5 and invest this money into some type of IRA. If you do this 14 times until they reach age 18, the amount they will have at retirement will be insane. Let's assume a 7% return. This will give them $967,257 at age 67 and that is just from an initial investment of $56,000 over 14 years. If they continue the contributions to the IRA over their lifetime, they will have just short of $4,000,000 (i.e., $3,999,249) at age 67. Now I could retire pretty well with that kind of money.