<prompt> Human: So at the tender young age of 35, I find myself basically starting from zero saving for retirement.The reason is that I recently left the military, and originally had planned to serve the full 20 years. For those who dont know, the military offers a pension retirement plan for 20 years of service. You dont have to pay anything into that, however the catch is if you leave before 20 you walk away with nothing. All Im walking away with is roughly 30K in a savings account I know--stupid!I currently make 80K at my new job. And while thats a lot more than I made previously, Im basically at zero for retirement savings. Im dumping a high percent of my salary into 401K but I fear it wont be anywhere near enough. If I plug numbers into a few 401K Calculators on Google, it doesnt seem Ill have enough by the age of 65 to live off my distributions for the rest of my life. And I have no desire to work until Im 65 either, Id prefer to retire in my late 40s or early 50s if at all possible. So as you can see Im kinda faced with an impossible situation.The only ways out I can see are to either open a personal IRA and maybe buy some individual stocks too, and hope to be smart with it all and multiply my retirement savings. The other option I was thinking about is possibly a side hussle of writing technical books and publishing them on Amazon, hoping to make a small fortune. The latter sounds childishly naive, I know. But Ive actually had some success writing technical stuff for my chosen profession and the technology used before. A lot of stuff Ive written is official doctrine at places Ive worked in the past, so I started questioning if I could actually profit off of it.  <response>: I wouldnt really call that an impossible situation, but I get your concern.The first point is that your income typically grows over time; if you keep your spending down you can be saving much more of your income within a decade, and that will provide for a lot of catch up. And you dont need to keep it all in a 401k or IRA, if you are ever able to max those out. You can supplement retirement just fine off of post-tax funds.Secondly, if you get married or start cohabiting you can pool your resources and your financial picture could improve.So work on your side hustle, work on saving as much as you can, and youll be in a good position for the future. 