NETRALNEWS.COM - An app can help you order a pizza, find a parking spotor plan your retirement.

In more than a dozen recent experiments, Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely used mobile apps and simple tenets of psychology to help people save more money, pay down more debt and devise and stick to budgets.

Overall, Dr. Arielys research at the universitys Common Cents Lab shows that people enrolled in the behavioral interventions spent less and saved more than those who werent.

We face more temptation now than ever to spend money, he says. While very few forces help us plan for the long term, lots of forces want something from us right now, including text messages and apps that market products including games and music.

Heres how to replicate some of the results in your own life.

Round Up When Budgeting

Few people like to budget. The task becomes more tedious when expenses are difficult to add quickly in your headlike a $1,024.71 monthly mortgage and a $354.43 student-loan payment.

To test ways to make budgeting easier, Common Cents sent emails to 3,000 randomly selected users of EarnUp, an app that helps people pay off debt earlier by automating their payments, among other things.

The researchers asked half the participants to consider rounding up their mortgage paymentsfor example, to $1,050 from $1,024.71. They urged the rest to overpay by the same amount$25.29.

The round-up group had 37% more takers than the group asked to overpay, according to Common Cents co-founder Kristen Berman. She says the approach simplifies mental accounting and retires debt sooner, while overpaying only accomplishes the latter.

By paying an extra $25 a month, someone with a $310,000, 30-year mortgage at 3.76% can save more than $7,000 in interest and extinguish their debt a year early.

Stick to a Weekly Budget

People with a budget tend to adhere to a monthly time frame. But using weekly spending targets can better prevent overspending and under-saving.

Consider an experiment Common Cents conducted among food-stamp recipients. Those given a weekly spending budget stretched their benefits three days longer, on average.

A shorter time frame allows us to better understand trade-offs, says Ms. Berman.

A $20 grocery bill may feel like no big deal to a person who has just received an average households monthly food-stamp allowance of about $250. But when considered in the context of a $62-a-week spending goal, $20 feels significant, says Ms. Berman.

To keep from overspending, download a budgeting app like Qapital or Digit, which can sync to a bank account. And select a weekly rather than monthly goal by using Qapitals spend less rule and Digits goalmojis.

Dr. Ariely is on Qapitals board, and he is an investor in the company.

Save Windfalls Now

It is easier to pledge to save $1,000 next year than it is to save $1,000 today. The problem occurs when the future becomes the present. Then it becomes harder to keep the pledge.

Thats because choosing to save now means forgoing immediate gratification. People typically see the future in less-vivid terms than the present.

They gloss over future temptations they are likely to faceand wrongly assume they will be able to save more than they do today. To solution can be to commit sooner rather than later to saving a portion of future windfalls.

That includes raises, bonuses, tax refundsand those extra paychecks in months with an additional payday. In one experiment, Common Cents found that participants who pledged to save some of their tax refunds in February chose to put away 15%, on average, versus 10% for those asked to save on the day the Internal Revenue Service sent the money.

Thats a 50% increase based solely on when people were asked to save, says Ms. Berman. (Three months later, an average, across both groups, 85% of the savings were still in the participants accounts.)

Need help pre-committing? Try budgeting app Digits goalmoji feature.

Use Different Accounts for Different Goals

Many people deposit all of their nonretirement savings into one all-purpose bank account. But the tactic can make it psychologically easier to justify using the money for luxuries (a fancy new TV) or unplanned expenditures (new tires).

The trade-off becomes clearer if buying that TV means raiding savings earmarked for a specific purpose, such as early retirement or a Hawaii vacation.

Several programs, including Simple, Qapital and Digit, make it easy to save in separate subaccounts, often called envelopes. To protect your retirement savings, envelopes can be added for often-overlooked current expenses, such as car repairs.

Common Cents is helping customers of a credit union use envelopes to encourage them to create rainy day funds. Dont just label your envelope car, says Qapital Chief Executive George Friedman. To motivate yourself, say what kind of car you want, attach a picture, and share it with a friend.

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How to Boost Your Savings With Behavioral Science and Apps - Netralnews