Save More Tomorrow: Practical Behavioral Finance Solutions to Improve 401(k) Plans

One of the world’s top experts in behavioral finance offers innovative strategies for improving 401(k) plans.

Half of Americans do not have access to a retirement saving plan at their workplace. Of those who do about a third fail to join. And those who do join tend to save too little and often make unwise investment decisions.  In short, the 401(k) world is in crisis, and workers need help.

Save More Tomorrow provides that help by focusing on the behavioral challenges that led to this crisis inertia, limited self-control, loss aversion, and myopia—and transforms them into behavioral solutions. These solutions, or tools, are based on cutting edge behavioral finance research and they can dramatically improve outcomes by, for example, helping employees:

-Save, even if they aren’t ready to do so now, by using future enrollment.

-Save more by showing them images of their future selves.

-Save smarter by reshuffling the order of funds on the investment menu.

Save More Tomorrow is the first comprehensive application of behavioral finance to improve retirement outcomes. It also makes it easy for plan sponsors and their advisers to apply these behavioral tools using its innovative Behavioral Audit process.

Shlomo Benartzi is a professor and cochair at the Behavioral Decision-Making Group of the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He is also the chief behavioral economist for the Allianz Global Investors Center for Behavioral Finance. Benartzi co-created with Richard Thaler the acclaimed Save More Tomorrow™ program, which makes it easy for employees to increase their retirement saving rate. The program is used by more than half of the large employers in the United States and has likely helped millions of American workers boost their retirement savings. Similar programs are gaining momentum globally, including in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.  

Roger Lewin, PhD, is the author of more than twenty trade books, including the acclaimed Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, and has been a collaborative author of more than half a dozen books in the areas of anthropology, cosmology, animal cognition, and behavioral economics.

The Allianz Global Investors Center for Behavioral Finance is committed to empowering  people to make better financial decisions.  For more information, visit befi.allianzgi.com.