"I just need more discipline"

Most people explain their failure to save as a failure of character. They think savers are disciplined people who feel the same pull towards the coat and the takeaway and resist it, month after month, by strength of will. On this view you'll start saving when you become a more disciplined person.

The most thoroughly studied fact about saving behaviour contradicts this. It concerns workplace pensions, and it's been found repeatedly.

Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea studied a large American company that changed one detail of its retirement plan. Under the old arrangement, new employees were outside the plan unless they filled in a form to join. Under the new one, they were in the plan unless they filled in a form to leave. Nothing else differed. The plan was the same, and so were the contribution rates on offer and the freedom to choose. Participation among new employees was substantially higher under automatic enrolment. A large share of those enrolled automatically simply stayed at the default contribution rate and in the default fund, though few people hired under the old arrangement had chosen that combination. The authors attribute this largely to inertia. People tended to stay wherever they'd been put.

The United Kingdom later ran the same experiment on a national scale. Since 2012 employers have had to enrol eligible staff in a workplace pension automatically. Jonathan Cribb and Carl Emmerson used the fact that this was phased in by size of employer to measure its effect. They found substantial increases in the number of private sector employees in a pension, and a rise in the amount being saved.

Think about what these studies show. The employees under the two arrangements were the same kinds of people, with the same temperaments and the same takeaways on Fridays. Those hired after the change didn't have more self-control than those hired before. Far more of them ended up saving, and what had changed was the arrangement they'd been put in. Under one arrangement, saving required a decision and an action. Under the other, saving happened unless you acted to stop it.

If you're employed and over twenty-two, and you earn at least ten thousand pounds a year, you're very probably an example yourself. Your employer must enrol you in a pension automatically. A minimum of 5 per cent of your qualifying earnings goes in from your pay, and your employer adds at least 3 per cent, which makes 8 per cent in total. Those are the government's minimums as I found them in September 2026. That money leaves before your pay reaches you. You've probably been saving into a pension every month for years without any discipline at all, and without missing the money. You're already a successful saver in the one part of your finances where the saving happens first. In the part that depends on what's left over, you've saved almost nothing.

So I'd put the idea of discipline aside. It's the wrong explanation of the problem and it makes you feel bad without helping. People who save are, for the most part, people whose saving has been taken out of their own hands. It was done by an employer, or by a bank, or by a standing order they set up once on a good day. They don't win forty contests a month. They arranged things so that the contests don't take place.

This means that the solution isn't to become someone else. It's to spend twenty minutes, once, setting up an arrangement under which saving is what happens when you do nothing. After that, inertia will work in your favour.