Think of Investing for Retirement as a Gradual, Four-Phase Process

Financial planner Michael Kitces breaks retirement saving into four phases instead of treating it as one continuous behavior, since income, spending, and the capacity to save shift throughout a person’s life.

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• The four phases, in order: earning more money, saving more money, growing the savings, and preserving the resulting nest egg.
• Traditional investing advice tends to assume a lump sum is available to invest right away; Kitces’s framing fits the more common case of building capacity over years.
• Raises, promotions, and family changes (starting a household, later the empty-nest phase) shift which phase applies and what the priority should be.
• The Lifehacker writer notes their own early-career 401(k) fit the first phase: taking the employer match mattered less than focusing on earning more.