It’s common among good employers, but unfortunately a lot of companies don’t do it. We should be encouraging more of this because people tend to suck at preparing for retirement.
And while it doesn’t solve the emergency fund issue, people tend to adjust their spending based on how much lands in their account. This is called the hedonic treadmill, where people adjust they lifestyle to fit their means on the way up, but they struggle to adjust it back down. Automatically increasing investments just reduces the impact of a raise, it doesn’t actually reduce your actually income since it just pulls 1% out of your normal raise (probably 3%).
The proper solution is for people to learn to properly budget and cut out things that don’t provide enough value, but that’s a much harder problem to solve than automatically increasing investments.
It’s common among good employers, but unfortunately a lot of companies don’t do it. We should be encouraging more of this because people tend to suck at preparing for retirement.
And while it doesn’t solve the emergency fund issue, people tend to adjust their spending based on how much lands in their account. This is called the hedonic treadmill, where people adjust they lifestyle to fit their means on the way up, but they struggle to adjust it back down. Automatically increasing investments just reduces the impact of a raise, it doesn’t actually reduce your actually income since it just pulls 1% out of your normal raise (probably 3%).
The proper solution is for people to learn to properly budget and cut out things that don’t provide enough value, but that’s a much harder problem to solve than automatically increasing investments.