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To live comfortably in retirement, you need "to save until it hurts," says financial adviser and best-selling author Ric Edelman. People give lots of excuses for not saving for retirement, he says. They may be procrastinating, think they can't afford to save or fear losing money to bad investments, but they have to overcome those fears, because "a financially secure future will be up to them," says Edelman, who has a new book on the topic,The Truth about Retirement Plans and IRAs. The CEO and founder of Edelman Financial Services, a firm with more than $12 billion in assets under management, Edelman has written eight personal finance books, including the best-selling The Truth About Money. He's also a national radio and TV host. If you're not tucking money away for the future now, you can start by saving as little as $10 a paycheck or putting away half your next raise, he says. "A small amount of money can produce massive amounts of wealth over time. The key is getting started." It used to be that people didn't worry about saving for their later years because many had pensions, and they didn't live as long as people do now, Edelman says. "But we can no longer count on our employers, partly because they aren't offering pensions, and we don't stay with one employer. Many people change jobs every few years." Most experts expect Social Security benefits will be lower in the future, he says. "You can't count on your employer and you can't count on the government, therefore your retirement is up to you. That statement scares people, but in fact it should empower you, because it's remarkably easy to achieve retirement savings success." | 
