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what was your #1 money mistake?
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Anonymous
| Buying a house in the state where we lived before moving to DC. We thought we would be there a while but ended up moving here 15 months after we bought. It took us almost a year to sell it. |
Anonymous
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Buying a house too early, and buying too much house. I should have put the downpayment into paying off some of my student loans instead. I now have too much debt because I have a mortgage on top of student loans. I can't believe I was so stupid, but I fell in love with the house and lost my mind.
I do still love the house though. Very happy there. |
Anonymous
| Giving up career to become a SAHM cause my husband had a high paying and successful job. Then he becomes mentally unstable (bi-polar) in his 40's and wastes all our money away so we are now starting from scratch. Wish I had a career to fall back on and wish I had seen this coming (or wasn't so blind and naive)...... |
Anonymous
| Also buying too much house. Just because you can afford it doesn't make it worth it. A house is a time and money pit -- something always needs fixing or updating, and this is exponential in a big house. The utility bills are outrageous. We also have one of those huge yards with lovely landscaping that requires a landscaping service that costs half of our private school tuition every year. If I could do it again, I'd buy a smaller house with a smaller yard and save the extra money for earlier retirement, or spend it on trips. |
Anonymous
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Same boat with buying a house at the height of the bubble, although we used a family gift that came from investments for a down payment so that wouldn't necessarily have been available later. Still, we would have needed a higher percentage for the down payment AND house prices did not actually fall that much in the areas we were looking at, so it's not clear we would have been able to buy as nice a place after the bubble either way.
I have a couple of regrets money-wise, and oddly enough they all revolve around weddings! Paying 2k to travel to and be in a friend's wedding when that was a huge amount of money for me, only to have her be a total bitch. Paying more than we needed to for receptions for our own courthouse wedding that were full of people we don't even like (mostly family, sadly). That sort of thing. |
Anonymous
| Getting credit cards as an 18 year old with no job. I can't believe they would ever approve me but in the blink of an eye I ran up a 1500-2000 debt that grew and haunted me through me late 20s when I finally settled with them for something like 5000. What a waste and such a ding on my credit for so long. |
Anonymous
| law school |
Anonymous
| College |
Anonymous
| Marrying my ex-husband. When I met him I had no debt at all and $20K in the bank at age 25. When I divorced him at age 30, I had no cash and $20K in debt. |
Anonymous
| Buying too much house - we didn't buy at the wrong time or the wrong place - we just bought too much, and now the mortgage is more than I wish we had to pay given that our incomes are less than what we had. And that IS something I could have seen coming if I'd been halfway honest with myself. |
Anonymous
| Also bought too much house. It's too big for our needs and expensive to maintain. We love it but it is a drag on the finances and DH feels a lot of pressure. I wish we didn't get swept away by the idea of buying our dream house. I try to give this advice to friends but they seem just as stuck in the clouds as we were ... live and learn. |
Anonymous
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Spending so much during law school that I ended up with $60k in credit cards. Its been paid off for 7 years now, but it stresses me out to even think about it.
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Anonymous
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Losing several grand in options and stock trading in 2004-5 between my decisions to buy REITs and gold/silver and to buy gold/silver again (FWIW, I did ride Beezer Homes from 40 to 10).
Then my daughter was born, we moved to Vienna, and I no longer had money to play in the market with. |
Anonymous
| I bought Cisco at $62 and Microsoft at about $80 |
Anonymous
| Cashing out some mutual funds close to the nadir of the crash. |