The idea to start making contributions to the retirement account during your high-school years can look absolutely crazy. You have to combine part-time jobs and save enough money to pay for the apartment. For sure, it looks like you have plenty of time till the retirement age. However, time will be your best friend and you have a lot of it.
First of all, let us talk about the compound interest, which works for you like magic. In fact, it is just an interest paid not only on principal amount, but on earned interest too. Try to imagine the snowball that moves downhill and gets bigger and faster, but requires no effort from you at all. Eighteen-year old person is much luckier than thirty-five-year old one as he has more years to create his snowball.
There is no need to become the Wall Street expert to invest your money properly. Just choose some reputable companies such as Fidelity or Charles Schwab and create a Roth IRA in them. Having in mind the fact that at this point of your life you are most likely to fall into the lowest tax bracket, paying taxes once on your earnings is definitely the best option. At any age, you will be able to withdraw all of your money without paying additional taxes.
What you have to do is just to arrange the automatic transfers of your savings to this investment account. Fifty dollars per month will make a difference if you have forty years for your money to grow. It will be enough to choose something very simple like S&P 500 index mutual funds such as VOO or FXAIX, and leave everything as it is. Do not attempt to play on the stock exchange choosing the right shares as you can loose everything.
The most difficult thing will be your ability to resist yourself. Saying no to yourself every time you want to buy latte every day or another pair of sneakers will bring you much more money in the future. You can see that, by sacrificing a little bit of your money now, you buy your freedom in the future. It is definitely the good deal for you.