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A friend and I were talking recently about our children. Since we have children about the same age, their career and investment choices quickly became the subject of our conversation.

Unlike their parents, the last thing on a 25-year- old’s mind is retirement. The conversation made me think about the advantages of saving money while young.

There’s a huge advantage to investing early. Let’s look at two investment strategies and see how they play out in the long term.

Let’s say you start investing $2,000 per year when you are 18. You put the money in an account that pays 7 percent interest. This is a high interest rate compared to today’s market, but it’s the traditional average. You continue to invest $2,000 per year for 10 years. Then you let that money sit at 7 percent interest until you are 65 years old.

Another person doesn’t start saving until they are 31, but they save the same $2,000 per year at

7 percent interest until they are 65. Who has the most money when they are ready to retire?

The person who started early would have the most, in fact about $85,000 more. The early saver would have $361,418 (after an original investment of $20,000), and the later saver would have $276,474 (investing $70,000).

If the early saver continued to save $2,000 per year, they would have more than $706,000.

Two thousand dollars per month works out to about $167 per month. It is not a small sum, but one that can be saved by being careful. If you eat out during the week at $7 per day, bring lunch from home and you’ll save $140 per month.

This also is a good lesson for those of us who have grandchildren. Maybe the idea is not to save for their education — there are plenty of educational loans available — but to save for their retirement. Who knows how much it will take to survive a year when my grandson is old enough to retire, but I can give him a head start. The only problem is who is going to finance my retirement?

In fact, experts say that it is more important to save for your retirement than to save for your kid’s education. Maybe I can just get my kids to support me in my old age.