We’re not great at saving money.
Well, some of us are, some of us aren’t. You have good intentions, but then that money that you put in your savings account at the start of the month begins to filter through to your current account.
By the end of the month, the money you were meant to save ends up being spent on random nights out, a mate’s birthday present, and unexpected doctor’s appointment and many, many lunches.
Well, the above is our problems anyway.
But it’s not as if we don’t want to save – we know it’s important. We know we’ll need it if we want to buy a house/get married/travel/be secure in our 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 devotes less intentional 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.”
