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.

Read more: Retirement planning: A step-by-step guide

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.”

His recommendation: If you’re changing jobs voluntarily, and you’re close to the end of the vesting period, you may consider whether you could delay your start date in the next job by a couple months.

“Anything you could do to preserve the money is a plus,” he said.

Read more: How much should I contribute to my 401(k)?

It’s shocking to me how many people leave a job and forget about their retirement account.

“The biggest thing is just not losing track of your 401(k),” Wade Pfau, a professor at the American College of Financial Services and author of “Retirement Planning Guidebook,” told Yahoo Finance.

You can leave the money in your old employer’s plan, roll it over into your new employer’s 401(k) plan, or roll it over to an IRA. The downside to leaving the money at your old job, of course, is that you can’t add any more money to it. And you’re limited to that roster of investments.

But it can have an advantage most people don’t consider, John Scott, director of Pew Charitable Trusts’ retirement savings project, told me.

“Employer sponsor plans typically get institutional pricing for the investments,” Scott said. “So they’re cheaper than the fees you might pay on the exact same mutual funds in your IRA, which are priced at retail.”

Another way to view it: Even though you may not be actively contributing to the account, it may grow more than an IRA with the same investments and higher fees.

One of the main things a rollover provides is greater control over and flexibility. “An IRA allows you to access a wider variety of investment options and then control the sale, rebalancing, and allocation of those investments across accounts and time,” Rizzuto said.

When you roll your 401(k) account into an IRA, the company that administers the plan typically liquidates your holdings and then moves the cash into your IRA. But it doesn’t automatically invest it for you. That’s up to you.

If you’re moving to a new employer with a sweet pay bump, congratulations.

Chances are, your new employer has made a few important decisions for you.

Starting this year, 401(k) and 403(b) plans established after Dec. 29, 2022, must automatically enroll all eligible employees at a default deferral rate of between 3% and 10% of their salary, and the rate must increase every year by 1% until the participant hits at least 10% and no more than 15%. Automatic enrollment does not mean you have to go along with it. Workers can change the rate or opt-out.

The concern here is that the new plan may be starting you off at a lower rate of savings than you were making at your old job.

If you were setting aside 10% at your previous job, starting a new position where you’re auto-enrolled at 3% can have long-term repercussions. Given all the paperwork and onboarding sessions to ramp up your new job, it’s understandable to overlook this detail.

The typical job switcher experienced a 10% pay increase, according to Vanguard’s research, and a 0.7 percentage point drop in their saving rate. Most job switchers experienced a boost to their income, but just 44% increased or maintained their saving rate from their prior job. The majority of people decreased their saving rate.

How does that shake out?

For a worker earning $60,000 at the start of their career who switches jobs eight times across employers (for a total of nine jobs), the estimated loss in potential retirement savings could be about $300,000, according to the researchers.