Let me tell you something: our brain is an incredible machine, but it comes with a small design flaw. For thousands of years, we evolved in a world where almost everything followed linear rules.

• Hunting and gathering: If you walk twice the distance, you find twice the food.
• Manual labor: If it takes you an hour to make a spear, it takes two hours to make two.
• Immediate cause and effect: If you touch fire, you get burned instantly.

This way of thinking helped us survive, but it backfires when we deal with exponential growth. And trust me, this affects us more than we think.

The Shocking Events No One Sees Coming—Until It’s Too Late

We are incapable of grasping exponential growth—I struggle with it too. And when reality hits us with an improbable event that has enormous consequences, we are left in shock.

• Financial crises: Like the 2008 crash, where market collapse seemed impossible—until it happened.
• Drastic legislative changes: Like Prohibition in the U.S., which transformed the economy and society overnight.
• Technological advances: AI went from being a novelty to disrupting entire industries in a matter of years.

Your Brain Is Lying to You About Money (And It’s Costing You a Fortune!)

Because of how we evolved, we carry these biases, prejudices, or mental shortcuts that our brain uses to save energy and time—but sometimes they mislead us when trying to grasp exponential growth.

• Linearity bias: We assume the future will be a simple extension of the past.
• Small numbers illusion: We struggle to see how small differences can scale over time.
• Hyperbolic discounting: We prefer immediate rewards over waiting for larger future gains.
• Inability to visualize large scales: We struggle to imagine the effects of successive multiplications.

These biases make exponential growth hard to grasp. We fail to notice its slow build-up—until it suddenly explodes—causing us to underestimate things like interest accumulation or growing debt.

A perfect example is the boiled frog: if you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump out immediately. But if you put it in cold water and slowly heat it up, it won’t notice the change until it’s too late. The same happens with compound interest and other exponential processes—at first, the effect seems insignificant, but then it explodes in a brutal way. Financial Transurfing is the thermometer that warns you: you’re being cooked.

The Hidden Catch in “High-Yield” Savings Accounts

Let me tell you a story you’re going to love—and probably remember.

Fry, the protagonist of Futurama, had $0.93 in his bank account in 1999. After being frozen for 1,000 years, he wakes up to find… $4.3 billion! All because his account had an annual interest rate of 2.25%.

But here’s the truly mind-blowing part: if instead of 2.25% it had been 2.5%, his fortune wouldn’t be $4.3 billion but $43 billion. Ten times more just because of a tiny difference in the percentage.

That’s the power of compound interest. And it’s exactly what we fail to see coming.

In Fry’s story, in reality, interest in savings accounts is usually compounded monthly, not just once a year. This means his account in the future would have reached more than $5 billion. If you’re thinking about freezing yourself to become a billionaire, there are two major problems: inflation and the fact that, even if you have the best high-yield savings account, your bank can change the interest rate whenever they want… and in 1,000 years, they surely will many times.

At the end of the day, the interest rate on a high-yield savings account is designed—at best—to keep your money just ahead of inflation. And that’s in the best-case scenario. Fry’s billions probably won’t be worth as much in 2099 as we might think.

Because banks don’t offer these accounts to make you rich. What they really want is for you to lend them money at a ridiculously low rate, get used to being their customer, and eventually take out a personal loan at a much higher interest rate. Or a mortgage.

The Mortgage Trap: Why You’re Still in Debt After Years of Payments

Compound interest isn’t just something out of science fiction. We experience it every day, for example, with mortgages.

If you’ve ever simulated a mortgage, you’ll know that the total amount you end up paying is often double the initial loan. And if you’ve ever checked how much you owe when you’re halfway through the term, you’ve probably been shocked: more than half of the debt is still there.

This happens because most mortgages in the U.S. follow a fixed-rate amortization schedule, where early payments go mostly toward interest, and only later do you start paying off the principal. I’ll tell you more about this in another article because it deserves a deep dive.

The One Skill That Separates the Wealthy from Everyone Else

Not understanding exponential growth isn’t our fault—it’s just how we’re wired. But if we learn to see it, if we train our brain to recognize it, we can use it to our advantage instead of being caught off guard.

Fortunately, at Financial Transurfing, we have tools to solve this problem that our brain comes with by default—helping us visualize different possibilities calmly, isolating ourselves as much as possible from effects and emotions.