It’s only February, and Charly Stoever has already made a sizeable portion of their investments for the year.

At the beginning of each year, Stoever, the founder of Traveler Charly Money Coaching, makes the maximum contribution to a Roth individual retirement account, meaning they hit the $7,500 limit for 2026 back in January.

“A lot of people think that it’s better to drag out investing for retirement throughout the year and do what’s called dollar-cost averaging,” Stoever says, referring to a strategy of investing a set amount of money at regular intervals. “But for me, it just works better to front-load and max out my individual retirement account the first week of January in order to capture the entire year’s worth of…