...By some estimates, an investment of $1,000 in a retirement account today would balloon to about $17,000 in 30 years.... Fewer than half of American adults have enough savings set aside to cover three months of emergency expenses, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet one in five people surveyed by the financial website WalletHub thought a new phone was worth going into debt for.... upgrading annually over three years costs $418 more, or roughly $12 a month, compared with upgrading every three years, Flipsy said. Framed this way, it may sound like a bargain to get a new phone every year as opposed to every few years. But plugging these numbers into a financial calculator tells a different story. If you put $12 a month into a retirement account, like a Roth I.R.A. that has an average annual rate of return of 10 percent, that amount would turn into $25,161 over 30 years, according to Ms. Orman’s savings calculator.