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what was your #1 money mistake?
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Anonymous
| We've all made some! For us (DH and I) it was buying a very expensive car. Although the payment is doable now that we have a child I just see so many other uses for that money. We didn't buy this car till the other was paid off so it could be worse but it also could EASILY be cut in half if we didn't get caught up in the luxury hype. What about you? |
Anonymous
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Bought too much house.
Though even in hindsight, I'm not sure it was an avoidable mistake. It was either buy near the height of the market, or continue to rent for an uncertain amount of time in the hopes the market might eventually fall. Which it did, but not for several years, and not by enough to offset the pure loss of 3+ years of renting. |
Anonymous
| Put a big addition on our house. We could have waited and moved to a nicer neighborhood. |
Anonymous
| Smoking. |
Anonymous
| buying our house when we did |
Anonymous
off This. We should have bought less house, sooner (we looked from Mar 04 and didn't buy till Jan 05). We were being too picky and in the end, if we had offered on the first house what we ended up spending on the house we actually bought, we would've been much better off. We got bad advice. Part of the bad advice also including expecting and waiting for competing offers on our condo, which never came. If we had taken the first offer (that we got w/in 24 hrs) we would've made 135K more, 8 months sooner. Take away: bad real estate advice can be very costly. But if you are naive, you don't know you are getting bad advice. |
Anonymous
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Getting a graduate degree I haven't used...
Renting an expensive apartment from 2000-2003 instead of buying, we would have had sooo much more equity than we do! |
Anonymous
| Marrying DH. |
Anonymous
| Co-signed best friend's grad school loan. I don't regret us and it hasn't cost us much besides worry, but I would tell others NEVER to do it. |
Anonymous
Same here. |
Anonymous
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Not buying a house when we first married in late '98. We didn't want to be tied down and had grand plans of living abroad, etc.
We didn't buy our first home until late 2004. We paid much more than we would have a few years earlier. What really kills me is we are now living in the area that we were renting in back in '98. Our current home costs about $750K more than if we had bought when we were first married. Idiots! We had more than enough $ to buy a home when we first married so that wasn't the issue. We've been really savvy with saving, investing and real estate purchases since. |
Anonymous
| not buying investment properties in the mid 90s when I had the chance. buying too many dot.com stocks late in the game, and then buying fannie mae and gm a few years ago ... |
Anonymous
| I have to say, no one could have predicted the house situation. The prices just kept rising, and everyone had this feeling that they would be somehow "shut out" of the home buying process. It really is all timing. We were extremely fortunate in that regard (I'll spare you details), but most of America was not nearly as fortunate about timing as we were. Really, it was all timing. Who knew. |
Anonymous
| PP here. That said, we sacrificed plenty in the meantime. We have friends who moan about buying close in before the bubble because "that was all they could afford". Really? And you never had to move? Not once? Be grateful, if that is the case. Grass is always greener to some. |
Anonymous
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Not sure . . . I would say buying our house in 2005, but we also sold a house in 2005. Selling the house in 2005 was the best decision we ever made - we cleared $160K on that sale, payed off our student loans, and put 20% down on our new house in 2005. But still. Kind of sucks to have bought in 2005.
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