<prompt> Human: I am curious if there are any situations, or a line of thinking where it makes sense to open up a brokerage account and buying say stocks before you are maxing out an IRA and 401k?  <response>: The primary reasons to invest outside of tax advantaged retirement accounts would be the ability to access the money for say a future home purchase or something like that. Tricky because if you know you want to spend a certain pile of cash for a home purchase in say 18 months, you probably do NOT want to put it in an investment because the stock market might slide 1737; between now and then and really rain on your parade. But maybe youre thinking you might want to buy a house 3 or 4 years from now with no set deadline and you want to methodically build up a healthy down payment, well then yeah, that could be a good reason to carefully invest outside of retirement. If plans change, you can potentially move the non retirement investment into a ROTH IRA up to the annual limits a year or two from now so you can kind of have some flexibility for mights and maybes without necessarily risking your retirement nest egg. 