Start early
“You can’t control the market, but you can control your contributions and take advantage of the most fundamental and powerful force when it comes to investing – compounding interest,” says Andrew Almeida, a certified financial planner in Islandia, New York.
If you start now from zero and maximize your 401(k) contributions, adding $18,500 each year (the 2018 limit), it will take just shy of 27 years for you to become a 401(k) millionaire. (That calculation assumes a conservative 5 percent annual return.)