Bellwether Investment Management recently featured Dr. Preet Banerjee, a neuroscientist-turned-financial expert, for an eye-opening client webinar on the psychology of money hosted by Bob Sewell, the firm’s founder and chairman.
His central message? We’re fighting against millions of years of evolution when it comes to making smart financial decisions.
Dr. Banerjee opened with a striking analogy from the world of auto racing. He described how modern race cars with advanced technology have made driving faster easier than ever—but when inexperienced drivers make mistakes, those crashes are far more spectacular. The same principle applies to personal finance today.
“50 years ago, if you wanted access to the capital markets, you needed a lot of money, and you needed somebody—you needed a stockbroker to give you access to buying stocks and bonds,” Banerjee explained.
Today, barriers have virtually disappeared. He demonstrated this by timing how long it took to open a brokerage account and gain authorization to trade stocks, options, and crypto on margin: just 7 minutes.
Accessibility is important, but without guardrails in place, it can be particularly concerning for younger generations who, as Banerjee noted, “are more looking towards apps and online services for managing money, and they actually want to disintermediate the relationship with financial services themselves. That’s not necessarily a good thing.”
The core of Banerjee’s presentation centered on a fundamental truth: our brains evolved to keep us alive in caves, not to build wealth over decades.
Through an engaging brain teaser exercise, he demonstrated how our minds are designed to fill in gaps when context is missing. “In the absence of information, our brains are designed to fill in the gaps,” Banerjee emphasized. “And they were designed to do this so that we wouldn’t die when we were living in caves.”
He illustrated this with a vivid scenario about hearing a Tyrannosaurus rex roar. Our instinct to immediately flee—making a split-second decision based on limited information—kept our ancestors alive. But these same processes create problems with financial decisions.
“Those same processes that were so good at keeping us alive when we were living in caves are the same processes that will kill us financially today,” Banerjee warned. “Because every financial decision we make is a long-term trade-off choice.”
One of the most powerful cognitive biases affecting financial decisions is present bias—the tendency to magnify anything happening now while minimizing future consequences.
Banerjee explained that saving for retirement looks rational on a spreadsheet: make small sacrifices today for a large payoff later. But in our brains, it’s inverted. “The pain of saving money today and foregoing consumption is magnified. And the reward of having a lot of money down the road, 40 or 50 years down the road, is minimized.”
This isn’t a character flaw—it’s biology. As Banerjee noted, “99.99999% of our evolution has all been about surviving until tomorrow morning. It means that we are incredibly present-biased.”
Par for the course, the keynote speaker refers to cognitive biases, otherwise known as mental heuristics or rules of thumb, as a “portfolio of mental shortcuts our brains have developed” to act on decision-making with limited information. In good faith, Banerjee did acknowledge that each term has its own nuances, but he grouped them together for the demonstration.
Dr. Banerjee shared fascinating research on anchoring—our tendency to fixate on initial reference points and adjust up or down from that watermark. In one study, researchers found that people’s random phone numbers influenced their guesses about when Attila the Hun conquered Europe. “In the absence of a good anchor, [the mind will] anchor onto anything,” he explained.
This bias has real-world implications. Neil Stewart at the University of Warwick found that removing minimum repayment information from credit card statements had a dramatic effect. Banderjee summarized the stunning findings: “Their payments didn’t only go up, they went up by 70%.”
People were no longer anchoring to that artificially low number. Paying the minimum amount results in an immediate sense of accomplishment—dues paid, more money to spend right now—but that’s how people can get trapped in a long-term loop of high-interest credit card balances.
“If you have children who carry credit card balances, one of the things you can train them to do is to change their anchors,” Banerjee advised, as “looking at the balance outstanding and just a few seconds of thinking … will naturally lead to higher repayment behaviour.”
The tendency to stick with defaults is extraordinarily powerful. Banerjee cited organ donation research showing that opt-out countries have astonishingly high donation rates (Austria’s system has yielded a 99.98% consent rate), while the American and German opt-in rates reached 28% and 12%, respectively.
The lesson? “The defaults in our lives are incredibly important,” particularly when it comes to financial planning and family wealth conversations.
And those conversations, particularly around estate planning, are important—clarity can strengthen relationships and establish a common goal to work toward as a family without losing sight of individual priorities.
Beyond cognitive biases, Banerjee demonstrated how artificial intelligence is creating unprecedented fraud risks while pivoting into best practices for digital safety in the modern world. Using voice and video cloning technology, he showed how easily AI can impersonate anyone with just seconds of audio from social media.
“All a scammer needs is 3 seconds of someone’s voice in order to generate an AI clone, and with social media, they already have it,” he warned. This technology transforms the traditional “grandparent scam” from a high-volume, low-success endeavour into something far more dangerous, personal, and targeted.
His recommendation? Families should establish “AI safe words” or verification protocols before emergencies arise. By casually mentioning the word or passphrase—he mentions the call-and-response passphrase approach popularized in James Bond films—in question, you can better protect yourself from bad actors by proving the person on the other line isn’t an impersonator.
Importantly, Banerjee mentions that this is where “the younger generations [can] help and inform the older generations” thanks to their natural inclination to being tech-savvy. In response, Sewell acknowledged that “the whole family can come together [to] benefit everyone.” Too often, wealth discussions are viewed from a top-down perspective where the breadwinner leads. But when it comes to family wealth, democratizing decisions, information, experience, and expectations often leads to better outcomes for everyone involved.
AI can also be a useful tool for escaping some of the behaviours we’re most susceptible to, as Banderjee pointed out. The present bias, where anything that happens now has a magnified effect on the human mind, can be addressed by reducing the “psychological distance [between] your future self to the present.”
By using ChatGPT—or the software of choice—and NotebookLM in combination, you can make the future less abstract and more concrete.
First, list out everything you want to achieve in life, whatever that might be. Vacation properties, debt-free, travelling regularly—take these goals and ask your chatbot to create a narrative from the perspective of your future self who has accomplished what they set out to do.
From there, NotebookLM can take whatever output was created and turn it into a podcast with the audio overview feature. Of note, these are all available at the free tier.
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Step 1 |
List out your goals and priorities based on your values and what you want to achieve in life. |
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Step 2 |
Ask the chatbot to write a narrative from the perspective of your future self who has accomplished. |
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Step 3 |
Copy and paste the output into NotebookLM and click “audio overview. |
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Step 4 |
Listen to the podcast hosts, envision your success, and close the gap of psychological distance. |
Dr. Banerjee notes that this “actually encourages people to make better financial planning decisions … [and] re-invert the mismatch” that underpins present bias. He also highlighted that “it’s something you can show the next generation, and they’ll be excited to try it because it’s new technology.”
In turn, this can lead to more productive, family-wide conversations. “It might be the thing that gets them interested in engaging and talking and planning about money.”
Younger generations increasingly turn to social media as a substitute for traditional financial advice—a troubling trend given the lack of oversight. “There’s a lot of people out there who are not licensed; they have no oversight, they have no compliance, no regulatory bodies. And sometimes they have ulterior motives,” Banerjee cautioned.
Combined with easy access to capital markets and cognitive biases, this creates what he called “kind of a recipe for disaster.”
Despite these challenges, Banerjee offered actionable strategies:
As Bob Sewell concluded, “We all have [biases]. They’re inherent in who we are… But the first step is understanding those biases and then trying to look at how better to manage them.”
Understanding that we’re literally hardwired to make poor long-term financial decisions isn’t an excuse—it’s the first step toward making better choices. With the right awareness, planning frameworks, and professional guidance, families can overcome evolutionary programming to build lasting wealth across generations.
The key is recognizing that sound financial decision-making doesn’t come naturally to us. It requires deliberate systems, open communication, and the humility to seek expert guidance when navigating an increasingly complex financial landscape.
The views and opinions expressed in this summary are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bellwether Investment Management Inc.
