NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Am I better off making my Roth IRA contribution at the beginning of each year, or should I make monthly contributions?

-- Nelson Martinez, Hialeah, Florida

This is one of those questions you could spend a lot of time puzzling over, and still not come up with a definitive answer. Or you can simply use common sense to arrive at an immediate answer that will be right the overwhelming majority of times.

So let me give you the common-sense answer first: if you've got money for your Roth IRA contribution at the beginning of the year -- the maximum allowable contribution for the 2003 and 2004 tax years is $3,000, plus another $500 if you're 50 or older) -- stick it in your Roth IRA immediately.

If you don't have the full amount, invest whatever amount you have, and continue making contributions as you come into more dough. In short, fund your account to the max as soon as humanly possible.

There are two reasons I recommend this strategy. First, the sooner you get your money into the Roth, the sooner you have the possibility of racking up tax-free vs. taxable gains.

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Second, by getting your money in as soon as you can, you eliminate what I think is probably the single biggest obstacle to building wealth: procrastination. If you have the money but don't put it in now, there's always the chance you'll find a reason to spend it before you move it to the Roth. Getting it into the Roth decreases that chance.

Does following my recommendation guarantee you'll end up with the largest possible Roth IRA balance every single year? Of course not. It's always possible to conjure up scenarios where one might be better moving money into a Roth gradually.

Let's say you had $3,000 sitting in a money-market fund and you invested that money in a stock fund in a Roth just before stocks got hit for a big loss. Well, in that case, you would have been better off moving the money after stock prices had dropped.

But come on, we're not clairvoyant. So it would be absurd to try to time the movement of your money based on a guess about how different investments might fare.

Besides, even if you knew stock prices would fall in that case, you'd still be better off moving the money all at once to a money fund within a Roth, rather than keep it in a money fund in taxable account.

While I certainly recommend making the full Roth contribution at the beginning of the year, I also recognize that many people may not have the luxury of doing this.

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In that case, I have no problem with monthly contributions. In fact, I encourage people to have money automatically deducted from their checking account into a Roth. It's an ideal way to get around that procrastination problem I talked about earlier.

One final note: the same advice applies if you're investing in a traditional deductible IRA instead of a Roth. If you're unsure which to do, click here. Quicker is better, but the most important thing is to make sure that, one way or another, the money actually gets there.

Walter Updegrave is a senior editor at MONEY Magazine and is the author of "Investing for the Financially Challenged." He also answers viewers' questions on CNNfn's Money & Markets at 4:40 PM on Mondays.