Written by Eric Nelson

Are you way behind in saving for retirement, or haven’t started at all?

Good news: There’s a way out of your predicament! Follow these three basic principles religiously and, along with a little luck, you still should be able to achieve your long-term financial goals.

What if you’re about 45 today and have nothing saved…Fear not, you aren’t a complete lost cause. I can give you three basic principles that you could begin following today which very well may, by the time you reach retirement, push you over the million-dollar asset mark.

#1-You Have To Embrace Time

If you think you are going to get to $1M overnight, you’re sadly mistaken. Think of it this way: If you are in your mid-40s with almost nothing put away for retirement, you didn’t get this way overnight. You made conscious or unconscious decisions for years (decades?) to consume and not save. Or maybe you did save and invest and it turned out terribly. Maybe an unfortunate divorce took a big bite out of your savings. Whatever the cause, it’s taken time to get here and it will take time to get out. Don’t look back, start looking forward.

Right now, we consider “full retirement age” to be 65 in this country, and while that may be pushed back a few years in the near future, it’s a rough number we can work with. It represents two full decades where you can get serious and get to work on accumulating some meaningful wealth that should support you for the rest of your life.

Knowing you have time is crucial to our second principle, because it eases your mind during the inevitable short-term periods when things are not going as planned.

#2-You Have To Be Disciplined

I’m not going to lie: It’s going to take a ton of discipline to get you over the $1M threshold. What do I mean by discipline?

1. First, you’re…[going to] have to stop spending all your income. I figure you need to start putting aside $1,500 per month into an investment account, or $18,000 per year and, every year, you’ll need to give your retirement savings rate a raise: Start with inflation, or about 3% per year.