Abstract
Financial problems have a large negative impact on people’s lives. It is therefore important that they engage in healthy financial behavior, for example, putting money aside in savings to cover unexpected and necessary expenses. Saving money, however, does not come easy for many people and they can need some help with it. In the present chapter, we address two behavioral interventions that aim at increasing people’s savings. First, we address an intervention that is very effective in increasing retirement savings by successfully bypassing or exploiting several psychological hurdles that usually withhold people from saving. Next, we discuss an intervention that aims at increasing savings for a specific goal by facilitating goal progress monitoring. Together, these interventions show that using theoretically derived insights from social psychology and behavioral economics is very valuable in helping people to make healthy financial decisions.
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Notes
- 1.
The National Institute of Family Finance Information (Nibud) is a well-known and respected independent foundation in the Netherlands and gives advice to households about all kinds of financial matters (www.nibud.nl).
- 2.
Results showed that the mean of minus 15% had a standard deviation of 341%, indicating large individual differences in goal progress. Half of the participants had a goal progress of plus 50% or less.
- 3.
We used multilevel modelling to examine the change in percentage of goal attainment over time. This technique can deal with the hierarchical nature of the data (i.e., measurements nested within participants). Condition and the interaction between condition and time were our independent variables. Age, gender, household income, and experienced financial scarcity were added to the model as covariates (results concerning these covariates are discussed in Van der Werf et al., 2019).
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van der Werf, M.M.B., van Dijk, W.W., Wilderjans, T.F., van Dillen, L.F. (2019). The Road to the Piggy Bank: Two Behavioral Interventions to Increase Savings. In: Sassenberg, K., Vliek, M.L.W. (eds) Social Psychology in Action. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13788-5_13
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