Find out which languages impact the way we think about the future, and specifically about our money-saving habits.
Watch your language. What separates you from earning more money is the language you speak. Language is one of the factors that determines money-saving behaviour.
According to behavioural economist Keith Chen, languages that don't have a future tense strongly correlate with higher savings. The structure of languages affects our judgments and decisions about the future and this might have dramatic long-term consequences.
Languages such as English constantly remind their speakers that future events are distant. For speakers of languages such as Mandarin future feels closer. As a consequence, resisting immediate impulses and investing for the future is easier for Mandarin speakers.
People who speak languages that use auxiliary verbs for distinguishing present and future will have a different perspective of present and future than people who speak languages that do not use this type of verb. It causes them to think that the future is more distant, so they tend to spend more money in the moment and are less concerned about saving for the more distant future.
Each language organizes and describes the future differently. Linguists call this distinction future-time-reference (FTR, for short). Some languages, like German, have a weak-FTR, which means that the distinction between today and tomorrow isn’t very concrete. In German, you can say, “It rains tomorrow” whereas in English you have to say, “It will rain tomorrow.”
Languages with weak future tenses would be more thoughtful about the future because they consider it, grammatically, equivalent to the present
Simply put: If the future feels more distant from the present, that's going to make it harder to save money. On the other hand, if you speak a futureless language — where the present and future are spoken about the same way — you're going to feel the same way about them, making it easier to save in the present moment for the future.