It is not always easy to save for retirement, in part because for many people, it is so far that there is no sense of emergency.
New research suggests a solution: make the future feel.
“People find it difficult to save for the future, and part of the reason why people have trouble connecting with the future,” said Katherine Christensen, assistant marketing professor at the University of Indiana and the main study of the study. “We wondered, on the basis of previous research, if people felt more connected to their future, would they be more likely to save?”
After conducting and analyzing a series of 20 experiences to test this hypothesis, Christensen says that the answer is yes.
Research has revealed that when we think in the future, more than 80% of the time, we start by thinking about the present.
“What we have done is mainly going back this,” says Christensen. Start the reflection process by imagining this future before returning your thoughts to the present and the savings objectives you have to achieve to get there.
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Although the difference is subtle, it has been shown that people motivate people to save more. In an experience carried out by the research team with more than 6,700 customers of a Swedish fintech company, people with low -balanced savings accounts were 14% more likely to invest in a long -term savings product when they received a notification with language encouraging them to think about the future first.
Hal Hershfield, professor of marketing, behavioral decision -making and psychology at the University of California in Los Angeles and one of the study authors, says that the guests were designed with a deliberately simple verbiage. “”[We] Had a language in the sense of: “The year is 2034 … Let’s go back to 2024 and plan to save for 2034”, he says.
Although research has been adapted to institutions such as banks on how to make customers save more, Hershfield says that individual savers can apply their results using a similar wording.
“The key here is to start in the future and rewind back,” says Hershfield, “rather than the traditional approach to start from now on and zoom in to the future”.
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The authors of the new study based their hypothesis on the previous results according to which people perceive travel to unknown locations as longer than the identical duration return trips. In other words, we perceive returning home as faster than traveling to an unknown destination.
This cognitive oddity takes place because uncertainty creates a mental distance, says Christensen. In other words, people perceive the unknown as being further than the familiar. This “effect at home”, as scientists call it, is true for the way we think of years as well as kilometers, that is to say that the link with safeguard for future events or the stages of life arrives.
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You are more likely to save for a future that seems imminent, says Christensen. “Since the present is more certain than the future, we reduce the feeling of uncertainty” by anchoring subjects with a mental destination of current familiar reality, she says. “In our boost, you are mainly heading for certainty.”
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Martha C. White is a commercial and financial writer in New York. It can be contacted at report@wsj.com.
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Appeared in March 10, 2025, print the edition under the name of savings objective by imagining the future.
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