Why is it so hard to save money even when I earn enough?

Because saving works against a built-in bias. Your brain places extra value on rewards you can have right now, so spending today beats saving for a payoff months away. Add a world where spending takes one tap and saving takes effort, and the deck is stacked against the habit.

What is the easiest way to start saving money?

Automate it and start tiny. Set up a recurring transfer to savings on payday so the money moves before you can spend it, then begin with an amount so small you barely notice it, even $5 a week. Small, automatic wins build the habit, and you can raise the amount later.

How is prize-linked savings different from gambling?

With gambling you risk money you can lose. With prize-linked savings there's nothing to lose: you keep every dollar you save in your own bank account, and the draw ticket is a free bonus on top. The reward is wired to saving, not spending. We go deeper in our guide to whether prize-linked savings is gambling .

Why Is It So Hard to Save Money? Blame Your Brain

You already know how this is supposed to go. Spend less, save more, start early. If you have spent five minutes on personal finance TikTok or sat through a high school money class, you have heard some version of it a hundred times. The advice isn’t wrong. It gets repeated because it works.

So why is it so hard to actually save money? The answer has surprisingly little to do with understanding the advice. Saving runs against the way your brain is wired, and modern life has tilted the field even further toward spending. A 2025 H&R Block survey (opens in a new tab) found the average Canadian puts just 7% of their pay into savings, well below the 20% rule of thumb, and 85% now say living paycheque to paycheque feels like the new normal. The struggle is psychological far more than it’s a matter of financial literacy.

Why does saving money feel so hard?

Saving feels hard because of a wiring quirk economists call present bias: we place outsized value on rewards we can have right now, and steeply discount the ones that arrive later. Every dollar you save is a small reward you give up today for a benefit you won’t feel for months or years. Your brain notices the sacrifice, not the payoff.

Classical economics assumed people act like rational calculators, weighing every choice for the best long-term outcome. Decades of behavioural research showed we don’t. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated that human decisions bend in predictable, systematic ways the textbook model misses. One of the clearest examples is how we handle time. Offered $20 today or $30 in a month, plenty of people grab the $20, even though waiting would earn a return no investment can match. Economist David Laibson called this pattern hyperbolic discounting (opens in a new tab): the further away a reward sits, the smaller it looks from where you stand today.

Saving asks for the exact opposite instinct, a steady trickle of small sacrifices now for a future that feels abstract. That’s hard to stay excited about, which is why willpower tends to lose. You already understand why saving matters. Understanding it just doesn’t make the daily trade feel any better.

Why is spending so easy now?

Spending feels easy because it has been engineered to almost disappear. A purchase that once meant counting out cash now takes a glance and a tap. Your card details are saved in the browser, your phone pays with your face, and buy-now-pay-later splits the cost into pieces small enough to wave through. Saving never got that makeover. It takes as much effort as it ever did.

Think about how little stands between you and a purchase. Card numbers stored in Chrome and Apple Wallet mean you can buy from anywhere you happen to be holding your phone, which is everywhere. Services like Klarna and Afterpay turn a $60 splurge into four payments of $15, blurring the line between buying and borrowing. You can order lunch you can’t really afford before you have finished asking whether you should.

Even your recurring costs have turned invisible. Streaming, apps, memberships, all on automatic monthly billing that’s easy to lose track of by design. The friction that used to make us pause has been smoothed away on every side. Meanwhile the cost of living keeps climbing: in that same H&R Block survey, 78% of Canadians expected to have less to put away in 2025 than the year before. Spending has never been easier, and saving has stayed exactly as hard.

Is willpower enough to save money?

No. Willpower is a battery that drains, and a savings plan that runs entirely on it will stall the first hard week. Life gets busy, a surprise bill lands, priorities shift, and the resolution you made after one finance video fades. Lasting savings come from changing the system around the decision, so you’re not leaning on willpower at all.

Behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein made this case in their book Nudge: people tend to stick with whatever the default is, so the trick is to make the good choice the easy, automatic one. The same design that makes spending frictionless can be pointed at saving. An automatic transfer on payday moves money before you can spend it. A recurring contribution that climbs a little over time means you decide once instead of every month. None of it asks you to be more disciplined. It asks you to set things up so you don’t have to be.

What actually makes saving stick?

The savings habits that survive a busy month all share one trait: they take the decision out of your hands. Rather than relying on you to choose well over and over, they make saving automatic, small enough to start, and rewarding enough to keep going. Here are the moves behavioural research backs, and why each one works.

Tactic	Why it works
Automate a transfer on payday	The money moves before you can spend it, so saving stops competing with everything else
Pay yourself first	Saving becomes the default, not whatever happens to be left over (which is usually nothing)
Start tiny, then raise it	A small amount clears the willpower hurdle; once it’s a habit, the number can grow
Make it rewarding now	An immediate payoff offsets present bias, so a far-off goal feels worth it today

That last one is the piece most savings advice skips. If the whole problem is that the reward sits too far away, then pulling a reward into the present is the most direct fix there is.

What if saving actually felt rewarding?

Prize-linked savings is built on exactly that idea. You save money the way you normally would, and your savings earn you chances to win cash prizes. Nothing is at risk, because you keep your money. The psychology shifts from sacrifice to anticipation: instead of waiting years to feel a payoff, you get a reason to look forward to saving this week.

The idea is neither new nor fringe. Economists Melissa Kearney, Peter Tufano, Jonathan Guryan and Erik Hurst, in an NBER paper titled Making Savers Winners (opens in a new tab), documented how prize-linked savings programs around the world pulled in people who had never managed to save before. From UK Premium Bonds to credit-union programs in the United States, the pattern repeats: a real shot at a meaningful prize motivates saving in a way that a few dollars of interest never could. In lab studies, people set aside more for a chance at a prize than for guaranteed interest of the same average value. It gets people saving because it fits how we actually behave.

How Lodavo fits in

Lodavo brings prize-linked savings to Canada, and it’s free. You connect the bank account you already have, keep saving as normal, and the more you save the more free tickets you earn in a weekly draw, where a user can win up to $10,000 and a guaranteed prize of at least $100 goes out every week. Even a small week of saving still gets you into the draw, so a goal that used to feel far away has a payoff you can feel now.

That’s what it looks like to make saving easier on yourself. Your money stays in your own account, earning whatever interest it already earns, and the free draw tickets are a bonus on top. You can watch the winning numbers reveal each week and see real users getting paid. Saving turns into the thing with a prize attached, which is a lot easier to stick with than saving on willpower alone.

You’re not bad with money

If saving has always felt like a fight, that’s not a character flaw or a gap in your education. You’re up against a brain wired for right now and a world built to make spending easy. No app erases the need for good habits. But the systems that actually work are the ones that meet your psychology where it is, automate the hard part, and give you a reason to feel good about saving today. There’s no shame in building yourself that kind of structure.

Ready to make saving feel less like a chore? Download Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab) and start earning tickets in this week’s draw.

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.