Now that we're at the new law firm the retirement plan is changing and I've been doing a bunch of homework to figure out what I want to do and where I'm at now.

The bummer about financial advice for retirement is that they always give you this scenario:

Trixie is 20 years old. Every year she puts $2000 into her retirement and invests it wisely and then when she's 65 she has $3 billion dollars.

Good for frickin Trixie but (a) I didn't have $2000 to spare when I was 20 years old and (b) that was a long time ago so hard cheese I can't go back in time and change that. Why depress me now?

The other bummer with all these start-early scenarios is that they factor in completely optimistic returns based on some parallel reality of financial good fortune that doesn't exist in the real world.

I didn't start at 20 but I did start early, squirreling away a little bit at a time and I am dismayed to report that I do not even have what I would have had if I'd stuffed it in a mattress.

Seriously, how am I supposed to get excited about saving?

I'm doing it anyway. I'm in the process of changing all my accounts and I'm being a bit more aggressive about saving more. We don't have to put any kids through college, so we'd better put ourselves into a nice comfortable old age. I'll have the cash and Bob will have the entire String Cheese Incident disc collection.