Saving For The Future Can Make For Healthier Retirement

A healthy retirement nest egg can help ensure a healthy retirement.

A study conducted by Lamar Pierce, an associate professor at Washington University, and doctoral candidate Timothy Gubler found that people who save for the future tend to take better care of themselves to ensure they are around and able to enjoy that future, according to a recent report in USA Today.

“The reason has to do with something called time discounting, a person’s tendency to value smaller immediate rewards over future desired results,” the story stated. “If you value large future rewards more than small immediate rewards, you’re more likely to save for retirement as well as to improve your health in the wake of tests that reveal high cholesterol, high blood pressure and the like.”

Pierce and Gubler titled their study “Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: Retirement Planning Predicts Employee Health Improvements.”

“Employees who saved for the future by contributing to a 401(k) showed improvements in their abnormal blood-test results and health behaviors approximately 27 percent more often than non-contributors did,” the authors wrote in their study. “Our analysis suggests that the same underlying psychological factors that are linked to retirement planning also predict health-improvement behaviors.”

“When people are informed of their situation, they rationally act in one domain and capture spillover benefits in other domains,” the article quoted Wesley Gray, a finance professor at Drexel University, as saying. “This is kind of cool.”