You Can Do This After Dinner: The Money Move Many People Put Off for Years
If you recently splurged on a restaurant meal for the first time in a while, you might have been shocked when the bill arrived.
The National Restaurant Association reports that menu prices rose by 0.2% in March, following a 0.3% increase in February. Eating out has gotten 3.8% more expensive since March 2025 — and that’s on top of years of restaurant inflation that set decades-high records in the post-pandemic era.
The good news is that right after dinner, you can pay for that meal and several others in the future with just a few clicks on your phone and a few minutes of your time. The following money move is one that most people put off, but by making it just once or twice a year, you can boost your savings substantially without cutting out trips to restaurants and other little luxuries that add flavor to your life.
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Auto-Escalating: Supercharge Your Savings in an Instant
The Secure 2.0 Act required all employer-based 401(k)s to adopt a feature called auto-escalation by 2025. The feature automatically increases the participant’s contributions by 1% per year until it reaches 10%, but no more than 15%.
It’s an excellent tool that can quietly increase savings without imposing too great a burden on the employee’s lifestyle or too steep a reduction in take-home pay — but you don’t need a workplace plan to make this strategy work for you.
No 401(k)? No Problem
Those without employer-sponsored retirement plans can implement the same tactic on their own by auto-escalating their savings once or, better yet, twice a year on their self-directed individual retirement accounts (IRAs), Roth IRAs or standard savings accounts.
Consider the potential.
A person who earns $60,000 a year and saves 10% of their income banks $6,000 annually.
If the savings rate increases to 11%, the employee ends the year with an extra $600, or several more trips to their favorite restaurant.
The employee forfeits only $50 per month, or less than $12 — barely enough for a pizza — per week.
A Little Now Can Go a Long Way Over Time
Auto-escalating works because 1% doesn’t deprive the average saver of too much take-home pay, but over time, the payoff is extraordinary, thanks to the power of compounding.
An employee who saves $6,000 a year, every year, will have a $1,091,660.55 nest egg 30 years later, $905,660.55 of which is from compounded gains.
However, if that same worker auto-escalated to $6,600, the final tally would be $1,298,923.02 — roughly $200,000 more from an $18,000 combined increase spread out over three decades — and that’s with just one auto-escalation in a single year.
Not a bad bump in financial security for a purchase costing just $11 and change per week, or about $1.50 per day.
This article was provided by MoneyLion.com for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, legal or tax advice.
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