Having trouble trying to load serialized object

Question

I am trying to save and load a single Java object with serialization. I managed to make it save it to a file and from the looks of it it contains the data correctly (I can "read" the file with a text editor and somewhat distinguish the contents of arrays and variables in there)

protected static void saveChat(Chats chat1) throws IOException {
    try(FileOutputStream f = new FileOutputStream("data.txt");
            ObjectOutput s = new ObjectOutputStream(f)) {
            s.writeObject(chat1);
        }

}


protected static void loadChat(Chats chat1) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException, 
                                                   ClassNotFoundException {
    try(FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream("data.txt");
            ObjectInputStream s = new ObjectInputStream(in)) {
            chat1 = (Chats) s.readObject();
    }
}

The problem comes when I try to load the (apparently) saved object chat1 with loadChat, which doesn't seem to do anything and doesn't load/write any data. I am not sure if I am missing anything.