Is it too late for me to worry about this and start making changes?

I think it'd be helpful for people first to hear, how would you even respond to that?

You know, I've had the same response largely for many years now, so I realized that some people will have already heard me say this, whether it's on another podcast, but truthfully, I haven't come up with a better analogy yet.

And it's really the analogy of saving for retirement.

So if you could be talking to somebody who's in high school or college and you were talking to them through the lens of, you know, being a financial advisor, they're fiduciary.

What would you say?

Well, you would say, listen, there's this really magical thing called compounding that Einstein basically said was the eighth wonder of the world, and you want to use it to maximum advantage.

And to do that, you should start saving immediately, right?

If you can start saving, you know, before you even, you know, when you get your first job, you should be saving.

And if not, certainly by the time you get out of college, you should be saving.

And if you do that, you don't really have to be that brilliant about it, right?

You just, you know, if you put all of your savings into an index fund at the age of 22, the probability that you are not going to be set when you retire is so low.

Okay, so that's great.

But what happens if you're talking to somebody who's 45 and due to life circumstances, like they just haven't been able to save?

They haven't made enough money to even have some disposable saving income or they've had, you know, they've saved and lost or invested badly or something like that.

Would you say, well, you know, too bad?

No, of course you wouldn't.

So I guess the point here is it is never too late to start saving for retirement, but you must understand something, which is the longer you wait to start, the more you're likely going to have to save, the greater return you're going to need, and therefore probably the greater risk you're going to take.

So it's never too late to start saving and it's never too late to start exercising.

But I want the message to be, don't wait because of some reason and say, well, you know, I'm going to wait until I'm older because, I mean, so, so anyway, to me, that's the best way to think about this.