In the sixth episode of Futurama, Fry opens his old bank account from 1999 in the year 3000 and found his savings of $0.93 turned into 4.3 billion dollars.

This was mentioned where his account held an interest rate at 2.25% and over 1,000 years, he became a billionaire.

I always assumed that was just some inflated number to sound big for the show, but ran a check on a compound interest calculator.

What I put in.

Initial Deposit-$0.93
Annual addition-$0.00
Interest rate-2.25%
Time-1,000 years

Result

4,283,508,449.71

Which I was actually shocked to see the show didn’t just make up a big number for the sake of comedy and had the real number.

Was initially going to just write the actual number and call it a post, but wanted to factor three big components to this.

First up, the accuracy of the interest rate.

Fry was using a standard savings account, which for most of the last 20 years would have a negative interest rate on it for fees holding that much money.

That means Fry would actually have likely ended up in debt to the bank after a few monthly charges of $10-15 build up and had his account shut down.

Next up, the average interest rate currently for a savings account from a bank isn’t 2.25%, but .06% and that’s much closer to the average the last 20 years.

Comparing that, the interest on .06% on $0.93 over a period of 1,000 years would come to a whomping $1.69.

Obviously a lot less, over the 4.3 billion shown in Futurama.

That said though, interest rates obviously have adjusted a lot and looking at the 80s and 90s, it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine 2.25% being the norm for the rest of history.

I now want to just focus on the number being 4.3 billion for arguments sake and seeing what 4.3 billion dollars is factoring in inflation.

For the 21st century, the US has had an average inflation rate of 2.44% according to the last statistic I read.

Just to compare how much of a difference that makes over 1,000 years.

$0.93
2.44% interest rate
1,000 years

27,419,071,555.81

Compared to the 4.28 billion that a 2.25% interest rate would produce.

That means Fry’s 4.28 billion over the course of 1,000 years would actually be only worth 15.6% of the $0.93 he had in savings.

Fry would had 4.3 billion dollars, but by the year 3,000, it’d be worth $0.14 today.

And that brings up the final point, which is what would happen if he had $0.93 in the S&P 500 on a clean buy in instead.

I used the same compound interest calculator on 10.5% and the number was so high, it wouldn’t even give me an exact result.

Checked on another one and it came to 2.1 quadrillion.

Which factoring in inflation, it’d still be billions of dollars today and make whoever held $0.93 in a bank for 1,000 year the wealthiest human in all of history.

All said and done, this post is why people should keep money in the market and not the bank.