[Scorpion Man]

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Buying individual stocks is too risky to be done with money crucial to your retirement. If you think you have a talent for picking stocks, you probably want to put 80% of your savings into a diversified portfolio of non-correlated assets (think domestic and foreign stocks, real estate, bonds, commodities). Dollar cost average into your positions and rebalance once a year.
Then try picking stocks with your remaining 20%. If you are good at it, you're individual stock selections' returns will quickly surpass your earnings from your safe money.

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I don't agree with this...in your 20s there is no such thing as money that is crucial to your retirement.

Now, buying stocks when you have no idea what you are doing is another matter entirely.

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Actually, you're incorrect. Because of compounding, money saved when you are 20 is worth far more than money saved when you are over 30. Think about it this way...
If you had a good job where you could save $20k/year, you would have $200,000 saved by the time you are 30. With 9% compounding (assuming diversified portfolio), you would have around $300,000. If your plan is to retire when you are 50, you wouldn't have to save another dime. Spend your whole salary and just let compounding over the next 20 years bring you to 1.7 million. Saving money from ages 30-40 in this way would not allow you to stop saving from 40-50 and still retire with the same nest egg even if you could sock away $30,000 instead of $20k. You would have $700k less.

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I have to admit that I am puzzled as to why folks are in the "you are incorrect" camp instead of the hmmmm, that seems different than what I have heard before, can you explain why you are saying that?

It is just not as simple as you are making it out to be. Of course money compounds over time. We are talking about risk and reward. More money saved earlier at higher rates is better...that is indisputable. But we are talking about trade offs. You are assuming certain rates of return...one of the reasons I ended where I did was that I took a more aggressive approach when I could afford the risk and had a much bigger stock market "BR" than others by the time I was 30. My point about age was that you can withstand the downswings MUCH better at a young age for 2 reasons...you have time to make it back up and your assets are usually small in relation to your earnings base. 9% compounding is nice. I compounded at more like 25% for a lot of years. And, as you point out, it is a HUGE difference to do that young.

Oh. And $1.7m is not within spitting distance of retiring money unless you live in montana. even then it would suck. And you are not inflation adjusting. Much of the return you are assuming is from inflation. $1.7m in 30 yrs is (off top of my head i am sure its wrong) more like $600-700k today.