Doesn’t have to be thousands of dollars. Just a thing you spent money on that turned out to be a complete waste.
Shorted NVDA 2 years ago.
Shit.
Waiting for the bubble to burst before buying a house.
Anytime now…
I was waiting too. Sorry buddy.
Ha, get ready for hyper inflation, your saved dollars will lose their value. All the rich finance bros will get sweetheart loan deals and buy up every scrap. Enter into fascist-feudal world. Where it gets hotter every year. Fuck you is the general plan I guess.
I don’t have dollars.
Haven’t you seen late-night infomercials? You can buy real estate with no money down!!!
It will the day I buy.
Dyson vacuum robot.
Worst would’ve been having a kid at 21, second worse was. It grasping how predatory credit cards can be. Survived the first but the 2nd one hurt the longest, now I treat credit cards like poison, I try to avoid carrying a balance at all costs and expend any extra funds to eliminate any balances before I look at other possible uses of that cash.
Credit card companies hate him!
You’re in the 1% or 2% of the population who actually learn from mistakes. Unloved by the business world for not being a profit faucet.
Not applying for scholarships. I didn’t have my mental health under control in high school and just didn’t apply for any. Not even the one I was guaranteed…
Rolling over a payday loan. You write them a check for $300 post dated for payday, they hand you $255. On payday, I would go back with a fresh $300 check to replace the one they just cashed so they could hand me another $255. This would be after exhausting overdraft from my checking that cost something like $35 to overdraw by $200. I wasn’t even on hard drugs or drinking, just weed and nicotine. By the time I was 30 I had $15k in financial judgements against me, it took another 4 years to pay everything off. It almost cost me a promotion during the credit check. Apparently you shouldn’t be a financial advisor if you’re terrible with your own finances but I talked my way out of it (and then failed as a financial advisor).
Biggest financial mistakes were mostly related to education, going into it without a clear goal/before I was ready, and paying for some courses that weren’t accredited by a university or association.
Same here. Went to school for music industry arts. Havent made a damn cent since.
I know an ~32 that is about 2 courses away from getting their BA in Fine Arts in music. They just stopped there. Haven’t used any of that study since.
The crypto craze of 2017
Underestimating the lengths that Trump admin would go to prop up equity markets during COVID
This one got me too/is still getting me.
Bought a house with my ex and we were instantly house poor. We didn’t account for buying things for the house at all. Ended up selling and moving two years later at a loss even though we sold for a bit more than we bought it for.
University
I spent 50 grand and 4 years of my life to be told by prospective employers that I either lacked real world experience, or that I was overqualified. It took me another 3 years to find a job after university - one that doesn’t require training and is barely relevant to my field.
I get to hang a pretty piece of paper up on my wall, I guess.
I’m sad I didn’t experience university, it sounds like a great time. Parties, drinking, last minute assignments…
Yeah that’s rough. I can kind of say the same. The career I chose doesn’t require the degree I have. It absolutely helps but if I could go back, I would have just gotten licensed at 18 and started working in the trade. Degree is mechanical engineering, trade is operations side of stationary engineering.
Overall, I guess this wins
Got convinced by someone I very much trusted to join an MLM as a 19 or 20 year old. After my parents learned about it, they were able to talk some sense into me, and I realized I was part of a pyramid scheme. I got out and basically broke even, which was honestly the best possible outcome of that whole scenario. It unfortunately degraded my relationship with the person who convinced me to join, and I never really could fully trust them after that.
Which MLM?
It was Stream Energy/Ignite Inc. The energy markets in many US states are open to suppliers other than the utility companies. Ignite/Stream offered bad utility rates with pyramid scheme marketing tactics and eventually were sued. Complaint here
Woah. That’s not your typical belly wraps, Tupperware, or make-up mlm.
That’s part of what made it sound good at first. It sounded like a unique opportunity with a “legitimate” company, and I was too young and inexperienced to really understand the implications of it, especially when coming from someone I had known for over a decade and really trusted.
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Community College machine shop. Too many graduates, not enough available positions.
Maybe a few $100 in total so not too bad.
I on the otherhand cannot wait until I can have a place of my own with a lathe and mill.
The best thing of having a machine shop and getting proficient with the machines is simultaneously having a god complex and imposter syndrome when you get to make cool stuff.
An old job where transportation literally cost me half my salary.
Oh fuck that
There are “True cost of driving” calculators to help understand this. Some of them are really involved. This one suggested to me that even my small, old hatchback costs something like $0.40 per mile, including depreciation, maintenance, fuel and so on.
One thing that most of us don’t have a gut feeling for: Even at $4-6 per gallon, fuel is usually not the biggest cost involved. That’s a lousy situation, because it means we don’t react to the real costs. “Market forces” can’t work if most of us don’t feel their pressures because we’re looking in the wrong places.
If you don’t feel like dealing with a complicated calculator, you can check how big a deduction the IRS allows for a mile of business use driving. This year it’s around $0.70.
Too many people don’t factor in the cost of transportation, and it’s such a big one, especially now. In the midwest especially I know I did. I got a new job that was an hour away by car, which is about 40 miles including navigating from my city, the interstate, and the destination city. I knew my old car wouldn’t make it that much, so I bought a new car to help (and stupid younger me thought I looked cooler with it). At the time, gas was about $3/gallon and I got 30mpg highway, and I’ll round down to account for city mileage. So about 2.5 gallons of gas per work day, so $7.50 a day, or $150 a month. That’s $1,800 a year gone to gas alone.
Then add in that new car payment ($500/month), and higher insurance (+250/month compared to previous insurance) and that’s $10.800 a year just to get to work, not counting anything else.
Then I think that I took the job because I could get 20k more than my current job in the same city thinking “oh that’s so much more money”. Only looking back do I realize I immediately lost over half of that just to driving there, plus probably ~6,000 to taxes. So my “cool” new job in the other city netted me about $3,200 additional in my pocket per year, which is an additional $250 a month. Was it worth the additional stress of driving 2 hours every day, 40 hours a month (an additional work week every month) just for $250 a month? Probably not.
Yeah… Bought a luxury sport car years ago. Gas was $2.5-3 for premium, now it’s over $6! I spend almost $350/mo now for roughly my 1k miles a month.
Cocaine and cocaine accessories.
Gets the best of us
Taste the meat not the heat
How much could a little spoon cost?
She was more expensive than i could ever imagine.
