Wellness Tip: SAVE. Simply pick a start date, set calendar alerts for set times when you want to up your contributions, and then sit back and watch your balance grow. Certain banks and brokerages will even automate the process for you by letting you program a percentage amount by which you can increase your contributions over time.

4 Ways to Trick Your Brain Into Banishing Bad Money Habits: "By having the money come directly out of your paychecks, before it hit their bank accounts, you will never missed the money. Essentially, you bypassed the portion of your brain that loves temptation and activated the slow-thinking region that promotes self-control.

While you could opt out of upping your contributions at any time (so you won't feel trapped), what happened instead was a phenomenon called “status quo bias.” In layman’s terms, it’s a tendency to keep doing what we’ve always done.

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Wellness Tip: Stop Bad Money Habits by choosing a particular plan, committing to the idea of allocating a certain amount to repayment each month and engaging peer support (read: those telephone or email reminders from friends). Once again, effort trumped any underlying genetics: “Good habits do end-runs around the parts of our personality that give in to temptation,” explains Dr. Shefrin.

4 Ways to Trick Your Brain Into Banishing Bad Money Habits:

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Wellness Tip: Banish Bad Money Habits by coming up with a RULE OF THUMB TO LIVE BY - a specific heuristic to help you combat each one. Psychologists have found that we tend to feel poorly about ourselves for breaking the rule, even if we created it.

4 Ways to Trick Your Brain Into Banishing Bad Money Habits: "Adopt a New Mantra
How It Works: For this exercise, you’ll be using the help of a fancy scientific term known as a “heuristic,” which is essentially a rule of thumb that you live by to make decision-making easier. You probably already have many money heuristics that you abide by every day—whether you’re conscious of them or not.
Some examples: “I only buy used cars,” “always take your tax return to the bank” and “I deserve to shop online after a hard day at work.” As you can see, some heuristics are better for your finances than others."

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Wellness Tip: "Override bad money behavior by adopting good habits that reflect the person you really want to be. If we identify ourselves as responsible, and take pride in living up to the virtues associated with that identity, then we activate reward centers in the brain associated with goal achievement,” says Dr. Shefrin. The other helpful factor: Humans have a desire to see themselves in a certain light, and we’ll reject anything that conflicts with that reality. It’s a phenomenon known as identity reinforcement theory"

4 Ways to Trick Your Brain Into Banishing Bad Money Habits:

TIP: "Spend on Your Best Self
How It Works: To make your money behave the way you want it to, you need to first decide who you are and then make your budget obey that identity. Perplexed? Let us explain. It can be hard to just “save” blindly or “not spend so much” when you don’t have a larger goal driving you. But if you’re someone who believes that providing for your children is important (like this mom, who says paying for her daughter’s college is her ultimate financial goal), you’ll be a lot more likely to make financial decisions align with your principles"

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