When the choice of whether to save or spend is taken out of people's hands through an automatic savings program, they save more.

According to a recent article in Money magazine, saving more money depends on ways to make it easy and automatic. In other words, people just don’t save enough when it’s left up to them to decide. Given a decision of spending an extra $100 a month, or saving it, most of the time it will be spent.

But perhaps we’re not giving people enough credit. Maybe most people do want to save money, it’s just one thing leads to another and the money is gone be for they know it. Sure, that $100 might be consciously spent on clothing or entertainment in many cases, but sometimes life happens and if the money is there, it’ll be used to meet life’s needs, i.e., more groceries were needed for the current month. Read more at www.csmonitor.com