but young people are the least impressed by that kind of appreciation that's why bernard shaw said youth is wasted on the young so let me do my best to make these numbers sound more impressive i'm going to walk you through it suppose you're 22 years old and you're just entering the workforce. you've got more than 40 years before you retire. so let's say you invest $10,000 in an s&p 500 index fund right now. and let's suppose that the next 40 years aren't too different from the last 40 years in that case, the average return of the s&p 500 holds steady at 10%, in four decades, your $10,000 investment will turn out to be worth more than -- $450,000 that's enough to send multiple children through college, grad school, buy a nice house, pay for a chunk of a ritzy retirement and that monster multiyear gain didn't require any kind of stock picking. it doesn't require you to trade or time the market or even do any research into individual companies, which i know is hard for most of you. you just need to invest your money in a low cost s&p 500 index fund and then you wait grant it, you're waiting