A new and somewhat puzzling phenomenon we have seen this year with several very large corporate companies is an “even only matching policy.”
An even only matching policy is our nick name for a company policy that will not match your contributions if you do not spread them throughout the year. Those of us that max our contributions early in the year, have terrific intentions, but we recommend spreading those contributions in order to max in the November-December time frame to keep from unknowingly missing matching.
At first we could not understand this policy, but it occurred to us that this most likely is a way to manage company cash flow.
Rather than digging through every company policy, which may unknowingly change, we recommend everyone continue the max contribution, but be sure to even the contributions throughout the year.
The most important item to understand is not to hurriedly max your 401k, given the possibility of missing a company matching. JK