Your last college keg party is a distant but distinct memory, you’re still slightly awed that you’re getting a regular paycheck and you’ve relied largely on water cooler gossip to determine how to proceed on your 401(k).

You’re a grown-up, but barely. And you have two grown-up questions: how much should you know about investing? And should you even bother to get more involved now, with the market looking like a roller coaster you’d much rather not ride?

Financial advisors agree: A lot, and yes.

Despite cringe-inducing quarterly statements, young adults may be in the best situation when it comes to investing. They may not have money, but they have lots of time.

“If you’re 26, you’ve easily got 40 years of saving in front of you for financial independence,” said Jeffrey Mehler, a Centerbrook, Conn., financial adviser. “Don’t think of it in terms of how much you’ll have next year, think of how much you’ll have 30 years from now.”

Vanguard’s Web site offers its own hypothetical scenario to demonstrate how much young adults stand to gain by investing now:

According to the demonstration, Dawn begins investing $2,000 a year every year from when she’s 25 to 35. She stops investing then. Dave, meanwhile, starts investing $2,000 a year every year from age 35 to 65.

At 65, Dawn, who has invested only $20,000, has $314,870. Dave, who has invested $60,000 over 30 years has $244,692. Dawn, it concludes, has gained more by starting early.

If she’d continued saving $2,000 a year every year, she would have $559,562.

The moral, repeated by financial adviser after financial adviser: start early, keep plugging away, and in the end, you’ll be OK.

“The investor who faithfully puts away a couple hundred a month to a halfway good mutual fund or even index fund will find themselves wealthy beyond belief by the time they’re in their late 50s,” said Curt Weill of Weill Capital Management in Palo Alto, Calif. “After all, the corollary of getting rich quick is getting poor quick.”

Lou Stanasolovich of Legend Financial Services in Pittsburgh, Pa., offers a three-step guide for young adults:

l Save, save, save. Build up an emergency reserve fund that will pay at the minimum for three months of expenses, but preferably for six months. Put that money in a good money market fund or mutual fund.

l After you have the money saved, then worry about paying off debt. “If you pay down debt and have no cash, you could have a problem,” he said. “If you have cash, you can tide yourself over for a while.”

l After that, put the maximum amount into a 401(k) that the company will match. If they’ll match on the first six percent of your income, go to the match. After that, put your money into a Roth IRA. When you eventually take that money out, it will be tax-free.

Before playing around with your retirement plan, financial advisers recommend learning all they can about investing. Too many young adults, they say, listen to co-workers or human resources people for advice without educating themselves about their money.

They recommend subscribing to financial magazines, taking classes or going to Web sites such as www.morningstar.com or www.vanguard.com and walking through some of their basic instructions on investing.

When Maria Valakos, 29, of New London, Conn., lost big in her 401(k), she realized she needed to know more about investing.

“It became really important for me to know where I was putting my money,” she said.

So on her 25th birthday, her parents gave her the best present she’d ever got: a visit with their financial adviser. Now she sees Mehler, her fee-only adviser, about once a year. They review her investments and are talking about how she can best invest her money for her 1-year-old son’s education. They’ve also developed a living will.

“As a young adult, you don’t think 20, 30 years down the line,” she said. “You’re thinking about today and how can you improve your career.”

Mehler advises young investors who are jarred by the current financial news to “shut off CNN” and other financial news programs. Then, after picking what they want to save, and investing in their 401(k) or Roth IRA, they should not look at their statements more than once a year.

“It’s not about doing it differently,” he said. “It’s about having discipline for 30 years.”