Market watchers were keeping a keen eye on the gloom surrounding this week’s European Summit (June 28-29). Investors are clearly worried the meeting may not produce substantive measures to tackle the ongoing debt crisis.

It’s tough to ignore the continued weakness in the financial sector. Today we had selling in shares of Citigroup (C), Morgan Stanley (MS), and Deutsche Bank (DB), which also caught an analyst downgrade this morning. Speaking of downgrades, cautious calls also led to pullbacks in stocks like Nike (NKE) and Halliburton (HAL).

On a positive note, there was a bit of green on the screen if you checked out the fertilzer sector rising on positive analyst comments. The gains are being paced by the likes of Potash Corp (POT) and CF Industries (CF).

Bankrate just released its latest study regarding savings habits of individuals, and the findings aren’t good. It appears only 25% of Americans have at least six months of savings built up. Nearly half (49%) of Americans polled don’t even have enough money saved to cover three months of expenses, while 28% have no cushion whatsoever.

To position yourself for success in investing (and life in general), it’s useful to identify key areas that are holding you back. These factors can range from needing to free up more money to invest each month, to cutting back on frivolous spending, or even a lack of education on how best to manage your investments.

So take a step back and consider what you can do to improve your finances. Freeing up the capital necessary to generate wealth is not hard, but without action, the clock will continue to run. Time will quickly become less of your ally and more of your enemy.

If you remember a study from earlier this year, The New School’s Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis released a starling report that painted a grim picture for many retirees in the Big Apple. The study calculated about one third of New York City residents nearing retirement age won’t be able to quit working, or will have to rely entirely on Social Security because they have less than $10,000 in savings. 36 percent of households near retirement had less than $10,000 in liquid assets and about 19 percent had $10,000 to $99,999, according to the report.

Clearly, time is creeping up on those who never put a wealth-building plan into practice. To help build up your nest egg more quickly, consider this point: taxpayers age 50 and over are eligible to make a Roth IRA catch-up contribution of an additional $1K/year, bringing the total of their contribution to $6K annually. And here’s the magic formula: if you were to invest $5K per year for every year in your 50s, each $5K you invest could turn into more than $40K after 20 years! To be able to achieve returns like that, quality dividend-paying stocks are a must. Historically, dividend-payers have averaged 10-12% returns annually.

Remember, it’s never too late to get the ball rolling. Even if you have to keep working for longer than you originally planned, at least you know you have a chance to recover financially in your golden years.

The bottom line is for individuals to start investing as soon as possible and consistently stick with the process of building a huge nest egg. Whether you’re starting from scratch and opening your first online brokerage account, educating yourself about the best dividend stocks, automating the process of getting money to be put to work to work, or just keeping a watchful eye over your portfolio each month, no one will care more about your finances than YOU!

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I hope everyone had a chance to check out our Dividend.com Premium members-only weekend articles , including new features that highlight some of the biggest winners and losers from the week that was, such as analyst upgrades/downgrades and earnings/story stocks. These articles are a great way to catch up on the week that was in the markets. We also have a rundown of how various Dividend ETFs performed on the week.

Thanks for reading everybody. I’ll see you tomorrow!

Be sure to visit our complete recommended list of the Best Dividend Stocks, as well as a detailed explanation of our ratings system here.