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Changing jobs can disrupt saving for retirement. Here's how to stay on track.

Leaving a job — whether you’re exiting for a new opportunity or have been laid off — can deliver a blow to your future retirement stash.

I know this personally, having switched jobs several times during my career. For the most part, I’ve rolled over account balances from my former employer’s 401(k) plan to an Individual Retirement Account that I then managed myself. In one early jump, however, I did the unthinkable and cashed out my 401(k), paid the tax and penalty, and didn’t blink. Retirement seemed so far down the road.

But one day recently, I paused to consider what that modest sum might be worth today after decades of compounding. Sigh.

The excitement of a new job, or the emotional minefield of being laid off, can make it easy to let retirement accounts at a former employer slip out of sight and out of mind — or even spur a short-sighted decision like I made so long ago.

“If someone changes or loses their job, they need to be aware of what options are available and how they can continue saving,” Ben Rizzuto, a certified financial planner and wealth strategist at Janus Henderson, told Yahoo Finance.

His No. 1 piece of advice: Whatever you do, try not to stop saving for retirement.

“While making sure you can meet your necessary expenses should take priority, if you can save a little bit, even a few hundred or thousand dollars today can turn into significant amounts after years or decades enjoying compound interest.”

Here are four other things to keep in mind.

When you jump jobs, you can leave retirement money on the table due to vesting periods for employer-matched contributions, which are typically three to five years.

Some companies offer immediate vesting for their employer contributions, but that’s not required by law.

If you leave a job before you’re vested and miss out on some or all of your employer contributions, that's a significant whack to your 401(k) balance. No way around that math.

Over the past 40 years, the median tenure of all wage and salary workers 25 and older has stayed at roughly five years, according to a new analysis by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). So having eight to 10 jobs over your career is likely, Craig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research at EBRI, told Yahoo Finance.

“People are taking many job changes over the course of their working years,” Copeland said. “If they have a retirement plan, that means that they are right at the time where they could be potentially facing a vesting issue. And they could lose some of their employer contributions if it is a direct contribution plan such as a 401(k), and that’s bad news.”

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