This Simple Reminder Can Help You Save More Money in 2026
With just 2026 days to go, you may be wondering how to save more money. It’s one of the most common New Year’s resolutions every year, after all.
Soon, a new study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found a simple but effective behavioral nudge can help you do just that. Sometimes, all it takes to increase your savings account balance is a well-timed reminder.
“One of the biggest obstacles to behavior change is that these activities are not top of mind. We forget to move money from checking to saving, or put it off until tomorrow,” said Katherine Milkman, lead author of the Wharton study, in a news release. But when these are important decisions, forgetting can have real consequences.
In the US, about 40% of US adults have less than one month’s worth of expenses, and 24% have no savings at all, according to Wharton. As a potential strategy to help reverse the trend, the study looked at whether email reminders could help encourage people to deposit money into their savings accounts.
To determine this, researchers analyzed the savings habits of nearly 2 million bank customers, making it one of the largest studies of savings behavior ever. The participants were divided into two groups. One group received no emails at all, while the other group received one of seven email campaigns over a two-month period.
People who did not receive an email reminder are less likely to deposit money into their savings account. Meanwhile, participants who received an email reminder were only 0.05 percent more likely — regardless of the type of reminder they received.
Researchers found, however, that a form of email reminder can really move the needle. The most fruitful reminder is the one that was planned every week, encouraging them to be grateful if they haven’t done it or, if they have done it that week, congratulating them.
The group that received this type of email campaign had a 1.3% chance of making a savings deposit. While these numbers may seem small, given the state of Americans’ savings balances, simple (and free) interventions like these can make a big impact.
Wharton estimated that if everyone had received this type of email reminder, they could have collectively saved an additional $6 to $10 million, and it would have cost the bank almost nothing to operate.
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Your backup reminder
Wharton research shows that a simple reminder can go a long way in helping you reach your savings goals.
And while your bank probably won’t send you automatic savings reminders as a study participant, you can refer to the study design to set up your own reminders.
Workplace tools like Slack, Outlook and Google Calendar have reminder functions that allow you to adjust your message, time and more. In calendar apps, you can create a transaction to transfer money from your savings. Then select the time, date and frequency to tune it for optimal performance.
Similarly, in Slack, the “/remind me” function allows you to schedule useful nudges through the app that can – most importantly – come as push notifications on your phone.
Milkman, with Wharton, says the survey was designed with email because of its simplicity but is also “very easy to ignore,” adding that other methods may be better at getting your attention.
Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly releasing features that allow you to schedule updates and reminders as well. In ChatGPT, functionality is currently only available to paid users.
However, a similar tool called Perplexity allows you to set up scheduled tasks in the free version. With the task function, you can create recurring reminders with custom messages that come via email, SMS or the app.
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