Saving money is hard. For most of us with salaries, the most powerful way to put aside money for the future is to make sure it never gets in your wallet. Employers know this, and they thus divert a chunk of salaries straight into pension accounts and direct-deposit the rest to the bank. Money is thus set aside before we even lay eyes on it.

Not everyone, though, has a regular paycheck or access to these kinds of financial tools. Low-income households – who, arguably, need them most – are especially lacking in reliable saving devices. 

Dean Karlan and Jonathan Zinman recently tested a really simple mechanism that can help.  They take advantage of the enormous growth in cell phone use in developing countries – but not the way you might think.

Karlan and Zinman teamed up with local banks in Bolivia and Peru to test the impact of sending text messages to a group of clients who had recently opened saving accounts.  The text messages simply reminded them to make a deposit. Nothing fancier than that.  But the result, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal, was that merely texting people and reminding them to save increased savings-account balances by 6%.

What do you think, would it work for you?