Surveys and financial studies keep landing on roughly the same number lately. The latest figure making the rounds, courtesy of a recent Yahoo Finance report, puts a "comfortable" retirement at $1.2 million.

My first reaction is the same one I always have when I see these numbers. That is a lot of money, and for most people it feels impossibly far away.

Then I think back to 1987, when I walked into a brokerage office with two hundred dollars and a head full of ideas from a library book. If someone had told me I would eventually build a portfolio that could support a retirement, I would have laughed. The number felt fictional. What I didn't understand yet was how time does most of the heavy lifting if you just get out of its way.

Let me run some simple math, because the math is the part that actually matters. If you invest $400 a month in a broad market index fund and earn an average annual return of 8 percent, you reach $1.2 million in about 38 years. That isn't a trick or a loophole. It is compounding doing what it does. Your early contributions start earning returns, those returns earn their own returns, and somewhere around year twenty the growth starts to look almost unfair. The money you put in during year one has been working this whole time without asking you for anything.

Now, 38 years is a long time. I understand that. If you are starting at 45 instead of 25, the math gets harder. You either need to save more per month, work longer, or adjust what "comfortable" means for you. There is no shame in any of those options. I would rather someone face the numbers at 45 than pretend they will somehow catch up by picking the right stock.

They will not.

What concerns me about headlines like this is the paralysis. A number like $1.2 million can feel so large that saving $300 a month seems pointless. Why bother, right? You are never going to get there anyway.

Except you might. And even if you land at $800,000 instead of $1.2 million, that is still dramatically better than zero. The survey number is an average, pulled from what people say they think they will need. Your actual number depends on your spending, your location, whether you have a pension, and a dozen other variables that no survey can capture.

What I tell people, and what I will keep telling people, is to pick an amount you can sustain. Invest it regularly in something boring and broad. Do not stop when the market drops, because the market always drops eventually. I have lived through the crash of 1987, the dot-com bust, 2008, and the mess of 2020. Every single time, the people who held on came out fine. The people who panicked and sold did not.

Consistency and patience. That is the whole secret, and it is not really a secret at all.

As always, I am sharing perspective based on four decades of managing my own money. I am not a financial advisor. Talk to one before making decisions about your specific situation.