Sometimes, things come up during the month that we just can’t plan on.
You have good intentions, but then the money that goes into your savings account ends up going on an unexpected doctor’s visit, an expensive playdate, a new washing machine because the last one broke… and God knows what else.
By the end of the month, the money you were meant to save is gone and that family holiday you planned to go on is out the window.
But it’s not as if we don’t want to save – we know it’s important if we want to be secure and comfortable in the future.
However, it turns out that it might be the way we’re built. A new study published in the journal Nature Communications shows that humans are hardwired to prioritise earning money, and therefore concentrate less on saving.
It then has a knock-on effect, as we’re not prioritising it, it then gets devalued in our minds.
Co-author of the study, Adam Anderson, associate professor of human development at Cornell University said: “Fundamentally it comes down to this: saving is less valuable to our brains, which devote less attentional resources to it.
“It’s more than a financial problem of making ends meet. Our brains find saving more difficult to attend to. Even without bills to pay, our brains put a thumb on the scales, making it easier for us to earn than save.”
The other co-author, Eve De Rosa, said of the findings: “Saving is so devalued and unattended that we perceive events associated with saving as occurring later in time.”
