Saving is twice as fast with this simple trick

Ezra Finch
2 min readApr 1, 2022
https://unsplash.com/photos/iRWXtXNXjIY

In theory, saving is a breeze. You just put some money aside every month and you don’t get it anymore. Unfortunately, in practice this is usually different. All around us are things that we want and in addition, you often unconsciously spend more than you think. The result is that at the end of the month you have again not achieved your savings goal. It sucks, but you can do something about that. There is a surprisingly simple trick.

Dan Ariely has discovered how to save twice as fast. Dan is a psychologist and author of the book Money and Behavior . In this book, as the title suggests, he looks at how people deal with money. To find out how money and behavior influence each other, he conducted several experiments. One of these led to a handy trick that makes saving twice as fast.

Save twice as fast

In an interview with Trouw , he explains exactly what he did and what the outcome was, but in short it comes down to the following. A group of Kenyans was divided into three and each subgroup was given a savings target. Subsequently, the groups were motivated in different ways:

  • Group 1: weekly messages to remind them to save.
  • Group 2: a bonus when they saved a certain amount.
  • Group 3: weekly messages and a gold coin. This coin had a box (24 in…

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