Thursday, September 16, 2010

Looking Ahead to the Spend-Down Years - NYTimes.com

I saw this ad from Lincoln Financial last weekend, and thought it was pretty good.

Then I saw this article in this morning's New York Times and realized that Lincoln had some pretty solid behavioral finance work behind the piece.

First, here's the ad:




An article in this morning's Times indicated some research that had been done at Northwestern that indicated the following:

Researchers at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University created images of college-age survey participants that showed how they might look as they aged. In tests, participants who saw the aged image of themselves saved twice as much for retirement as those who saw their current appearance.

So this commercial plays right into the retirement planning market.

The article ends with another observation, noting that older participants might react differently to images of how they might look in a few years. As one of the Northwestern professors said:

“If you take a 65-year-old and say here is an image of what you will look like at 90, that could be potentially very scary. It might have the opposite effect from what we want and make people want to spend now.”

Looking Ahead to the Spend-Down Years - NYTimes.com

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