During my 20’s it was easy to live in the present, only ever thinking of retirement as being a far-off fuzzy “what if” scenario.

The best time to start investing is 20 years ago. The second best time to start investing is today. Lots of us realize that we’ve lost some time that could have been spent investing, yielding a lot of future income and security.

So far, so good is all I can say at this point. My quarterly increments are working out quite well, even though I’m a bit behind on the savings portion of this quarter’s plan.

I read a story on the NBCNews.com website of a 123-year-old man living in Bolivia. Of course, this got me thinking, “What if I live 40+ years past the age of retirement? Could my funds stretch that far?”

For me, I began developing an interest in long-term investing after exploring career paths. My first real exposure to the concept of investing came in the form of an unpaid internship at a boutique sized investment bank in Los Angeles.