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Finance

The 3 biases that stop you saving

"You don't save for 3 behavioural reasons: 

Present bias is our tendency to live in the here and now. We discount the future excessively and ignore it. For example, you want to exercise but choose immediate pleasures like eating and watching TV instead.

Second, you have inertia or the status quo. Change is difficult. It's so easy to keep doing what we're doing and if we're used to going out and spending, it's so easy to keep going out and spending.

With the “Save More Tomorrow" program, we don't fight inertia, we work with it to make it easy to start saving.

Once you’re in the program, when next year happens, you're going to automatically save into your future. Also every year thereafter we're going to automatically increase the savings.

This automation helps to overcome inertia as it's going to happen on its own it's like on autopilot.

The third is loss aversion, which is a problem with savings because if I'm asking you to take my money away, I’m not able to spend it. Putting it aside it could feel like a loss. So we don’t do it.

We overcame this by thinking about when to take your money. It’s easier to find a bit extra to save when there’s an increase in income, reducing the feeling of loss. So we took the savings when people had a salary increase."

Shlomo Benatzi

Behavioural Scientist and co-creator of the Save More Tomorrow nudge
www.coglode.com/wisdom/the-3-biases-that-stop-you-saving

Jerome's notes

Shlomo's been working on helping people save more since the 90s. He and co-creator of SMarT have used behavioural science to help 26 million Americans save for their futures. This is arguably the most successful use of behavioural science in history!

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