https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/04/28/most-americans-dont-trust-themselves-with-their-ow.aspx
https://faculty.som.yale.edu/jameschoi/commitment.pdf
When offered a choice to put money in two accounts paying the same interest, but one of which restricts withdrawal while the other does not, study participants put substantial amounts of money in the restricted account.
Smart folks. Most of us should be doing this. Tax-deferred retirement accounts where there’s a penalty for early withdrawal are the same thing.
Fascinating. As a general rule, we never touched anything in savings or retirement accounts. The only exception was that we did take a bit out of savings for ed expenses when income couldn’t quite cover all of them.
We are happy having lots of liquid savings as well as tax-deferred accounts.
Let’s face it, if we have “enough” and can live below our means, some will be do save while others will spend all they have and the next paycheck while they’re at it. Also what “enough” is varies greatly among folks.
However, the tax-deferred retirement accounts have the additional feature of tax deferral (i.e. not paying taxes on yearly earnings; taxes paid only once at the front door (Roth) or back door (traditional)) that can add considerable value for some types of investments (the kind that generate lots of yearly taxable income). So some users of these accounts may be doing it for the tax deferral while not seeing the penalty as desirable.
Apparently, the actual paper is on a server where HTTPS does not work. Here is the HTTP link:
http://faculty.som.yale.edu/jameschoi/commitment.pdf
99.9999% of people can not handle money. (I use that % to make a point but it is probably close to accurate)