Filed under → The Waiting Fee
Waiting has a price. Nobody sends you a bill.
Put in what you have today and what you can add each month. See what the S&P 500 turns it into. Then see what the exact same plan is worth if you start a few years from now instead. That gap is the fee, and it is the most expensive thing in here.
After 30 years in a plain S&P 500 index fund.
You put in $36,500. The rest showed up on its own.
Now the expensive part. What if you start later?
Same deposit. Same market. Same finish line. The only thing that changes is when you begin. Most people assume starting late costs them the deposits they skipped. It does not. It costs them the growth those deposits would have thrown off for the rest of their life.
Money you never invested
$6,000
That is the entire mistake. Compare it to the fee.
You skipped $6,000 of deposits. It cost you $97,256. That is $16.21 gone for every dollar you did not put in.
- Start now
- $235,967
- Start in 5 years
- $138,712
Same plan. Two start dates.
“Okay, but where does the money actually go?”
This is the question that stops most people, and the answer is boring enough to fit on a napkin. Three parts.
An account
A Roth IRA if you have earned income, a regular brokerage account if you do not. The account is just the bucket. It is not the investment, and picking one is a twenty minute job you only do once.
One fund
An S&P 500 index fund. One purchase, 500 companies, a fee measured in hundredths of a percent. When somebody says “I put it in the S&P,” this is the entire thing they did.
An automatic transfer
Set the monthly amount and stop watching it. Every number on this page comes from time and repetition, not from skill. Nobody on this chart picked a single stock.
The math, in the open
How it compounds. Your starting amount plus a deposit at the end of every month, compounding monthly at one twelfth of the annual rate. That is the standard ordinary annuity, the same function the other Financial Rebellion calculators use. Check it yourself: $100 a month for 10 years at 10% comes out to $20,484.50.
Where the rates come from.
- 10% is roughly the average annual return of the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested going back to 1928. It is the number everyone quotes.
- 7% is that same average after inflation. It is the more honest one, because it is what the money will actually buy.
- 12% is a genuinely good stretch. Plenty of 30 year windows have done it. Plenty have not.
What is not in here. No taxes, no fund fees, no trading costs, and no attempt to model a bad decade landing right before you need the money. Averages are smooth and real life is lumpy: the market has handed out losing decades, and the order the returns arrive in matters as much as the average. This is an illustration of how compounding behaves, not a forecast of your account.
The waiting fee. Both scenarios end on the same date. The late one simply skips its first stretch of deposits, including the starting amount, then runs identically. The fee is the difference between the two ending balances. Nothing is charged to you anywhere. That is exactly why it is so easy to pay.
Show me the numbers
Balance at the end of each year, both start dates side by side.
| Year | You put in | Start now | Start later | The gap |
|---|