Want to save more for retirement? First, imagine your future self

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It isn’t always easy to save for retirement, in part because for many people it is so far away that there’s no sense of urgency. New research suggests a solution: Make the future feel closer.

“People struggle to save for the future, and part of the reason why is people struggle to connect with the future," says Katherine Christensen, an assistant marketing professor at Indiana University and the study’s lead author. “We wondered, based on past research, if people felt more connected to their future selves, would they be more likely to save?" After conducting and analyzing a series of 20 experiments to test this hypothesis, Christensen says the answer is yes. The research found that when we think about the future, more than 80% of the time, we actually start off by thinking about the present.

“What we did is essentially flip that," Christensen says. Start the thought process by imagining that future before you turn your thoughts back to the present and the savings goals you need to meet to make it happen. While the difference is subtle, it has been shown to motivate people to save more.

In one experiment carried out by the research team with more than 6,700 customers of a Swedish fintech company, people with low-balance savings accounts were 14% more likely to invest in a long-term savings product when they received a notification with language prompting them to think about the future first. Hal Hershfield, professor of marketing, behavioral decision-making and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the study’s authors, says the prompts were designed with deliberately simple verbiage. “[We] had language along the lines of: ‘The year is 2034…rewind back to