What's the worst financial decision you've ever made?

[Tyga11]

Just curious...

[overcoil]

trusting a lawyer was probably the worst.

[Alfisti]

Two examples.

1) Legit story. Had a bet all lined up at 5 agencies in Australia, $2K each on Brawn GP after the first day of practice, was 88:1 to win the WCC. My balls shrank and i bailed. Near $900K down the drain.

2) Way too conservative. I've had access to near $1m at barely 2pc interest over the last 7 years and did fuck all with it, huge, huge mistake.

[DarkishM5C]

Getting into a timeshare property.

[ASAP]

i am pretty sure this thread was already here once and the most common answer was I bought a BMW lol

[Our03z4]

Not investing sooner. Trying to convince my nephew to start now as he recently turned 18.

[///MPhatic]

I don't come from money, so I've never had any real money to make really bad decisions with, which means all of my bad financial decisions have been car related. Things like buying the wrong car and trading too early, financing too long to make a car that's really out of my range affordable, losing money on mods, etc. I'm glad most of that is behind me. I'm still heavy in my M2 (about $75K), but I plan to keep it.

I guess the only real mistake I've ever made was not investing sooner, just living that middle-class dream with too much "stuff."

[dreamingat30fps]

Bought a condo in my 20s at the height of the market before the 2008 crash. Never planned to stay in it more than a couple of years but because of the crash we were there for like 5 years. The area went waaaaaaay down hill as soon as we moved in and became pretty horrible. Enough so that I decided to short sell it after trying to rent it out for like a year or so with limited success.

I mean... I guess ultimately apart from the hit on my credit it wasn't that bad. With the short sale I only ended up losing a couple grand and at the same time I bought my current house almost at the bottom of the market. However it was a pita and stressful and I would not want to do it again. I was stupid and listened to people telling me home prices never go down and if I didn't get that condo I would end up never being able to buy anything.

[CamasM3e93]

1998 had 2k in my pocket to invest in a local dot-com startup. Narrowed it down to Drugstore.com and this online bookstore called Amazon. Took the income write off years later when drugstore went bankrupt.

[floridaorange]

Lost $25k in the stock market this past year after making $25k in the stock market the year before. Didn't know my style of trading would turn on me as quickly as it did.

[JMcLellan]

Originally Posted by floridaorange

Lost $25k in the stock market this past year after making $25k in the stock market the year before. Didn't know my style of trading would turn on me as quickly as it did.

Pretty much the same story for me. I did my first stock trading in 2021 and at first I couldn't lose. All the gains were lost and then some in 2022.

Don't beat yourself up, 2022 was one of the worst performing years ever for the stock market.

[JMcLellan]

About 20 years ago when I had really bad credit and a low paying job I decided to buy a new car. Loan got approved but with a crazy high interest rate so I was paying way too much for it. Then I got into tuning and modding the car big time. I spent all my cash on parts, within 6 months of having the car the dealer voided my warranty (still had 4.5 years left on it) because of the performance mods. I had the car 6 years, refied the loan a couple of times, and still had about 7K owed when I traded it in. I don't want to know what my total spend was between car payments and performance parts but I'm sure it was more than double the purchase price of the car.

[MoeTE87]

Went to Universal Technical Institute in AZ. Took out loans to go back to school. Loved AZ but didn't care for the school. I moved back home to OH after living out there for two years. The school was a joke and did not offer to help myself or anyone else land jobs in the field, so that is why I moved back home and was a service manager at a local dealer but I couldn't stand the politics of the dealer world with that dealership. Got out and moved into the financial / security / senior IT project manager for the past 9-10 years and seriously couldn't be happier with how my life has turned out! So I am grateful for what I had learned and experienced.

[ShopVac]

Having kids.

Bloodsuckers...all of them.

[DubaiRich]

Got married to a bloodsucker; we divorced, and she got half!

[overcoil]

Originally Posted by DubaiRich

Got married to a bloodsucker; we divorced, and she got half!

DubaiRich, Napa Calif... with names and locations like that must be an amazing story to be told.

[DubaiRich]

Originally Posted by overcoil

DubaiRich, Napa Calif... with names and locations like that must be an amazing story to be told.

I plead the 5th.

[M_Six]

Made an assumption about a condition in my divorce agreement that turned out to be wrong. Not terribly costly, but annoyingly persistent.

[Sara]

Buying multiple horses. Turned a large fortune into a small fortune lol, though they bring so much joy

[Germanauto]

It's what I hadn't done. 10 yrs ago in undergrad I worked for Tesla and their stock was trading around $30. I chose a career in Medicine instead of Engineering or anything else that would have landed me a corporate job at Tesla upon graduation (which all my colleagues successfully did). I'm obviously doing fine but my life trajectory would've played out differently to say the least.

And not investing in mutual funds/ETFs at an earlier age (outside of 401k). Was stupidly playing around with individual securities.

[Tyga11]

Originally Posted by Germanauto

It's what I hadn't done. 10 yrs ago in undergrad I worked for Tesla and their stock was trading around $30. I chose a career in Medicine instead of engineering or anything else that would have landed me a corporate job at Tesla upon graduation. I'm obviously fine but my life trajectory would've played out differently to say the least.

And not investing in mutual funds/ETFs at an earlier age (outside of 401k). Was stupidly playing around with individual securities.

Wow...assuming you were still there, you would probably be a multi millionaire right now (maybe you are already)

That one decision...and you left all that money on the table. Jeesh.

[Germanauto]

Originally Posted by Tyga11

Wow...assuming you were still there, you would probably be a multi millionaire right now (maybe you are already)

That one decision...and you left all that money on the table. Jeesh.

Yeah exactly. I'm about 8 years out of undergrad but would've probably been a Bay Area millionaire and homeowner by now. But at that ripe age of 20 I was naive and thought being a Doctor = wealth. Did not realize the concept of opportunity cost at that time. Medicine is 7+ yrs of little to no income before the money arrives.

During the 2010s I was in school working for free, meanwhile big tech was a golden ticket.