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AbstractMany people delay their preparation for retirement. Policy-makers often attempt to motivate people to take timely action by increasing the perceived importance of retirement saving, yet the effectiveness of such strategies can be doubted. We examined why a strategy of emphasizing importance may be ineffective by distinguishing between intention to prepare for retirement and action in actually taking steps toward preparation. Two surveys (n1= 1171;n2= 832) showed that importance and difficulty were both predictive of people's intentions to prepare for retirement, but that difficulty was a much stronger predictor of people's actual actions. Using data from an additional survey (n3= 986), a series of follow-up tests provided further evidence that difficulty of retirement preparation is a stronger predictor of inaction than importance of retirement saving. These findings help explain why policies aimed at simplifying retirement preparation (e.g., automatic enrollment) have been more successful than policies aimed at increasing the importance of retirement saving (e.g., tax advantages).

This article reports the results of a controlled field experiment designed to estimate the short-term effects of a 45-minute financial education program on the financial literacy and savings behavior of children in Dutch primary schools. Among fifth and sixth graders, the program led to a pre- to posttest improvement in financial literacy on almost one of eight questions, with about one-third of the increase in correctness attributable to the program. It also raised the probability of willingness to save by 4 percentage points. Nonetheless, whereas the program appears effective in respect to questions that explicitly address program content, its significant effects on financial literacy seem primarily driven by the results for girls, although we cannot reject homogeneous treatment effects with respect to gender.