Retirement is a long way off at age 30. As a result, many young people fail to take tools like retirement planning calculators seriously. This is a terrible mistake. Retirement is expensive. These days, many people live in retirement for 30 years. If you want to enjoy your retirement without having to work, you will need to save a great deal of money. Since most people are not independantly wealthy, they need to start saving for retirement very young. The best way to determine how much to save to reach your goals is to use a tool like a retirement planning calculator. Such a calculator can tell you whether your goals are realistic, so that you can make other plans now before it is way too late. If you do wait until later in life to make a retirement plan, funding a decent retirement may well be prohibitively expensive.