Use age-morphed photos to improve savings

What if you could instantly increase the desire of your kids to save?  Just by showing them a picture of what they might look like when they are older?  Interested?  Me too! Wired Magazine published an article recently about the work being done by Jeremy Bailenson, head of Stanford’s virtual reality lab and coauthor of the book Infinite Reality.

From the article:

Most people view their future selves as complete strangers, which makes them reluctant to put away money for a later date. But Bailenson and his team discovered that if people view a virtual version of themselves digitally aged by several decades, that hesitation disappears instantly. In one study, contributions to hypothetical retirement accounts went up by 30 percent.

→ http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/st_agemorph/ | Wired Magazine

I have no idea if the same effect has been tried and measured in kids, but I'm going to give it a try!

Here is a site that allows you upload a photo and age-morph it: http://morph.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/.  If that doesn't work well, an alternate approach may be to morph your child's picture with your own picture to give it a more "seasoned" look at: http://www.morphthing.com.

Once morphed, you could even upload these as the avatar images of your kids in FamilyMint.

If you decide to try it yourself, let me know how it goes.