How to Save More Money: The Planner vs. The Doer

You know you should be saving more. So why aren’t you? If the honest answer is “I keep meaning to,” you are not lazy and you are not bad with money — you are simply human. Learning how to save more money has less to do with willpower than with understanding two different versions of yourself, and gently designing your finances so the right one tends to win.

The Planner and the Doer

In 2017, the behavioural economist Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics for work that included a deceptively simple idea: inside each of us there is a Planner and a Doer.

The Planner is the version of you who sets a budget, intends to increase pension contributions, and decides that saving starts next month. The Doer is the version of you who lives in the present — who orders the takeaway, upgrades the phone, and reasons, quite persuasively, “I deserve it.” Both are you. But they rarely show up at the same time, and the Doer is the one holding the card machine.

Present bias: why “later” rarely arrives

The reason the Doer wins so often is a quirk of human wiring called present bias — we weight rewards we can have now far more heavily than rewards we have to wait for. A future benefit feels faint and abstract; a present one feels vivid and real. So the plan to save “next month” keeps politely rolling forward, and next month never quite becomes this month.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s the default setting. The useful response isn’t to scold the Doer — it’s to stop relying on the Planner being in charge at the exact moment a decision gets made.

Where this quietly costs you: pension matching and lifestyle creep

Two everyday patterns show present bias doing its quiet damage.

The first is the employer pension match. Many UK employers will match pension contributions up to a certain level — but capturing more of that match usually requires an active decision to increase your own contribution. The Planner intends to. The Doer never gets round to it. The result is often described as leaving money on the table.

The second is lifestyle creep. When income genuinely rises, the intention is usually to save or invest the difference. In practice, spending tends to expand to meet the new income — and once a lifestyle has expanded, you become beholden to earning that much just to maintain it. The pay rise arrived; the saving didn’t.

Save More Tomorrow: making the easy choice the saving choice

Thaler didn’t just diagnose the problem — he built a fix. His “Save More Tomorrow” programme asked people to commit, in advance, to saving more not now but from their next pay rise. Because the sacrifice sat in the future, the Planner could agree to it without the Doer putting up a fight. And because it was automatic once set, no willpower was needed on the day.

The results were striking: across the programme, average savings rates rose from around 3.5% to nearly 14% in a little over three and a half years. Thaler’s mantra summed it up — if you want people to do something, make it easy.

How to save more money, practically

The behavioural lesson translates into a few simple, general principles — not personal recommendations, just ways to put the Planner in charge ahead of time:

• Make it automatic. Decisions you only have to make once — like an automatic transfer on payday — don’t need the Doer’s cooperation every month.

• Move the sacrifice into the future. Committing now to save part of your next pay rise is far easier than cutting today’s spending.

• Check what’s already on offer. Understanding how your employer’s pension matching works is the first step to deciding, deliberately, whether to claim more of it.

• Name lifestyle creep out loud. When income rises, deciding in advance what happens to the difference stops it from quietly disappearing.

Where MoneyMade™ fits in

MoneyMade™ is a free financial education platform. We don’t sell products and we don’t recommend specific funds. We help you understand how money — and your own behaviour around it — actually works, and when you’d like personalised advice, we refer you for a free initial chat with a regulated, qualified financial adviser. No obligation.

Our 3-step process is simple: LEARN — explore our free education. CHECK — take the free 5-minute Financial Foundations Check to see where you stand. ACT — if it feels right, ask us to introduce you to a regulated adviser.

Ready to put your Planner back in charge? Take the free 5-minute Financial Foundations Check at www.mymoneymade.com/check and see what your next sensible step looks like. Then, if you want, we’ll refer you for a free initial chat with a regulated financial adviser.

This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. MoneyMade™ is not a regulated financial adviser. Individual circumstances vary. Always seek advice from a qualified and regulated financial professional before making any financial decisions.