And, 59 per cent of plans defaulted employees into a plan at a savings rate of 4 per cent of their earnings or more. Automatic or default enrolment options are increasing: 32 per cent of all plans offered default enrolment in 2012 58 per cent of all plans offered default enrolment in 2022. This change has had a positive impact over the past 20 years. The employee could then easily change the default option to any other option offered, but at least they had started on their retirement savings journey. Doing nothing meant an employee was automatically entered into the retirement plan and enrolled into a predetermined default (or “balanced” option).

Thaler and colleagues recommended pension plan designers do is to provide a default option. This daunting task meant that many employees never completed their application and never started saving for retirement. The employees not only had to fill out the paperwork to join the company plan but had to wade through countless investment options and select ones for their retirement plan.

Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize for his research in behavioural economics, studied the effectiveness of a variety of investment options that companies offered their employees for their retirement plans. And, as with organ donation, saving becomes the default position. Similarly, by setting up an automated transfer from their checking account to RRSP contributions, people soon don’t miss this amount and get used to spending less and saving more. What do stale popcorn and organ donation rates in Scandinavia have to teach investors? Reducing portion sizes helps people manage their eating habits. They discovered moviegoers still ate a third more when eating from a large container. The researchers wanted to see if the bucket size affected how much people ate, despite it being so unappetizing. They got either a medium-sized bucket or a large-sized bucket, but there was a twist: the popcorn was stale – two weeks old.

In a study, moviegoers were given free popcorn. There’s a related lesson that can be learned from an experiment with popcorn.

Popcorn macbook