You have probably read more than one account detailing our ill-preparedness for retirement.

Walter Updegrave, editor of RealDealRetirement.com, cites four major mistakes we're making. Here are two of them:

• "Stinting on saving," he writes. In a TIAA-CREF retirement survey, almost half of the near-retirees who were asked what they could have done to better prepare for retirement said they should have saved more. "Good answer. Because over the course of a career, failing to push yourself to save can cost you big time," Updegrave says. The more and earlier you start saving, the more your money can compound its gains.
• "Overpaying for investments." The more you pay in investment fees, the less you benefit from the magic of compounding. Updegrave offers a telling example. Say a 25-year old saves 15 percent of his/her income and amasses a $1.1 million retirement kitty. That assumes a 5.5 percent annual return after expenses. Cutting expenses 0.5 percentage point a year would mean a $1.4 million retirement horde.

"The costliest errors are ones we make ourselves, often without realizing how much damage we're doing," he notes.

Meanwhile, an Edward Jones study provided to Newsmax Finance shows just how bad the problem is when it comes to inadequate retirement savings.

A total of 45 percent of non-retired Americans aren't saving for retirement now, according to the survey. That 45 percent includes 36 percent who plan to save for retirement in the future and 9 percent who don't.

While the overwhelming majority of us at least plan to save for retirement, "when it comes to retirement savings, there's a big difference between planning to save and actually doing so," Scott Thoma, investment strategist at Edward Jones, said in a statement accompanying the report.

"While intentions to save for retirement are legitimate, individuals tend to satisfy more immediate, short-term spending goals and push off their long-term saving goals."

That's a big problem for people, "particularly as they enter the critical savings periods of their 30s and 40s, when they have (and unfortunately waste) a tremendously valuable asset — time."

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