Author: Parul Agarwal
Saving has lately been
recognized as an inevitable instrument of financial inclusion. But this
financial behaviour needs to be judicious as undisciplined saving traps people
in the vicious circle of poverty that results in accumulated debt. For low-income
households, situations have stunning capacity to influence behaviour and
decision-making (Mullainathan et.al). Additionally, their inter-temporal choices
and consequent poor planning indicate majorly loss averse behaviour i.e. their
loss of utility associated with giving up a good is greater than the utility of
obtaining it. Perfectly aligning with this conduct, low income people often
claim that they are not able to save because of reasons like high expenses and unexpected
shocks that their families are vulnerable to.
In this scenario of
restrained behaviour and varied preferences, access to a no-frills account hasn’t
proved to act as a trigger and because these accounts offer liquidity, they are
highly leaky budgets. An alternative could, thus, be a product that requires
depositor to be committed and disciplined and that constraints depositing and
withdrawing operations. In contrast to the underlying premise of such a hard
commitment product of enabling people to save through enforcement,
Psychologists emphasise the importance of self-monitoring for successful
self-regulation. Breaking a personal rule often has a devastating effect on the
individual’s self-view.
Benabou et.al complement this idea by stating that the
fear of creating precedents and losing faith in one-self creates an incentive
that helps counter the bias towards instant gratification. This school of
thought propounds a soft commitment product that operates on attention of
people rather than on their self-control and effectively impacts their psyche. Such
commitment savings products with possible variations have been tested globally
and are being explored to derive an appropriate design. One of the successful
experiments, conducted to this end, reminded people monthly (through text
messages or letters) about their instalments and savings goals. As a result, a
6% increase in saving and a 3 percentage point increase in likelihood of
reaching one’s goals were observed (Karlan et.al, 2011). Labelling savings
accounts with specific savings goals, thus, provides a salient reminder and
helps people in allocating funds.
A small pilot was run by
CMF to understand if a promise to save could motivate people towards actually
doing it. It was conducted with 41 low
income temporary employees who had access to atleast one formal channel to
save. The activity was structured to capture respondents’ savings behaviour and
savings goals. 46% of the sample reported being irregular in saving money and
remaining saved monthly. When asked about their perception regarding their savings,
60.98% people thought that they were not able to save the amount they would
want to and 52% of them attributed this inability to their inefficient money/ cash
flow management. Only 41.46% respondents self-reported their high level of satisfaction
with their savings and 56.10% strongly regretted being incautious while
expending. Education was the most popular short-term financial goal among
participants and they were unsure of their medium and long term ones.
Participants were
randomly assigned to one of the following three commitment groups:
- Writing a promise to self
- Making oral promise in presence of administrator of the exercise
- Making oral promise in presence of 1-2 colleagues
The experiment required
participants to commit to save a self-selected minimum amount once a week for
any three weeks over the following six weeks. Purpose of saving was also
recorded in the process. Most of the people committed to save for their stated
short-term goals and approximately 14% were unsure of what to save for. After
having promised, they were checked with at the end of every committed week if
they saved. This follow-up reminded them to save in subsequent weeks. 17.07%
people saved as per their commitment in the first week but nobody saved in the
second week. One of the savers in first week saved in the third week and 2 new
people started saving in the third week.
This was a very simple
experiment (to be studied further) with no penalties for default and only
promise acting as a motivation to save. Although the uptake of the product/
concept was high (73.21%), not many participants followed the discipline
because of the plausible reasons like high frequency of saving, lack of sufficient
reinforcement, not well thought-through promises etc. Nevertheless, percentage
of people saving in the first committed week is encouraging enough to expect a considerable
improvement with a tweak in product design and delivery (through a formal channel).
People can still keep themselves away from following the self-initiated discipline
by questioning their ability to save and that to reach their financial goals
but such a scenario elicits the contribution from researchers to study if
financial instruments acting on psychology craft low-income households into rational
decision makers.
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