We’ve all heard the advice… Spend less than you earn and save the rest.

That’s a good start, and if you successfully follow this adage, you’ll fare better than most. But it really is only a start. Because unless you’re saving for just a couple of years down the road, saving is simply not enough.

The critical next step, of course, is investing some of what you save. For some, investing is intimidating, or even outright scary. The fear of potentially losing even a portion of your hard-earned savings in an investment is a risk some feel they can’t or shouldn’t take.

But it’s important to understand how not investing can be riskier than playing it completely safe. That’s because simply socking cash away in a savings, money market, or CD account will rarely earn enough to keep up with inflation. This means your money will actually be worth less in the future than it is now, and most of us can’t afford that kind of falling behind.

Yes, it’s true investing offers no guarantees. While it offers significant upside earning potential, you also have to take on the risk of possibly losing money. That’s why the key is investing for the long haul.

During any single year, the stock market can rise or fall. But the losing years have generally numbered only about one out of every four. By investing long-term, you would historically have reaped three years of gains for every year of loss.

Of course, the stock market’s pattern is not this reliably tidy, and is never predictable. But with interest rates on bank accounts and CDs significantly suppressed over the last many years, simply saving without investing any of your long-term funds means you’re taking on a bigger inflationary risk than you might realize.