This Is Why Our Brains Don’t Let Us Save Enough For Retirement

You might have never realized this before, but psychology has a major role to play in personal finance. The way you save your earnings, spend, and make investments, all depends on the way you think and feel. This is more applicable for life events like retirement. Saving money for your retired life is necessary as you will need a financial backup when you are not working. If you want to ensure a regular cash flow in your golden years, saving and investing as much as you can before retirement is the best way to do it. However, an individual might come across several pitfalls while trying to save, invest, and take steps for long-term financial benefits. Below are the reasons why the brain doesn’t let you save enough for retirement.

You Hardly Make Decisions Thinking About Your Future

If you are a college student now or in your early 20s, you probably have no plans to retire before another 40 years or even more than that. If you are 30-something, you won’t be retired for another 30 years. As per the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, an average American doesn’t take retirement before 64. This is the reason why so many people think that retirement is far away and there is no need to chalk out a retirement plan so early. There is plenty of time, isn’t it?

Therefore, all you would do now is splurge money on things you love instead of setting money aside for your future. Experts term this as hyperbolic discounting. This happens when you are interested in making decisions that will give you immediate returns, rather than thinking about a future award. However, it doesn’t imply that you should never enjoy the present. All you have to do is create a budget to see how much you can spend on things that you love and how much to save for retirement.

Making a Change is Tough

The fact that there is a lot of time before you retire always plays at the back of your mind. Aside from that, learning the investment rules and determining which accounts to open might seem to be a daunting task. $6000 is the annual limit you can contribute to an IRA or Roth IRA in case you haven’t yet attained the age of 50. After you reach 50, the yearly contribution can go up to $7000. If your earnings are more than $140,000, you won’t be entitled to contribute to a Roth IRA.

After you fulfill all the criteria, you will have to open an account. This is where some of you go wrong. You keep on postponing what you should be doing at the earliest. A time comes when you realize that a whole month has gone by and you haven’t yet opened an IRA account. Sticking to a present situation often seems easier than trying to make a change. People are usually aloof since the current situation is not hurting them. All they do is to keep on pushing off all the important tasks to a later date.

Underestimating the Time it Takes to Save

It often happens that things don’t go according to your plan. You might have been confident about completing an assignment within a certain time period. But you have realized later that the task took more than you thought. According to experts, that’s a planning failure. Due to this planning fallacy, quite a good number of people defer saving until they are in their 30s or 40s. They have the confidence to garner enough savings for their retirement years in two decades.

However, once they start tracking their financial obligations and their expenditures, reality hits them hard. They realize that building a retirement fund is not that easy and it will take longer than they thought. As per the Journal of Accounting, more than 50% of people underestimate how much savings they would need for their retirement. Wrong decisions on that front would eventually leave you with an underfunded cushion.

The best age to start stacking up money for retirement is your present age. You can start with a 401(k) plan. If you have a Roth IRA account, tax-free growth of your contribution is definitely a benefit. Investing in your contribution might be tricky for you if you are a first-timer. You can take the help of several apps that will help you proceed, but in all cases you must remember that the right time to start saving is now.