What were your biggest financial mistakes?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Buying this money pit of a house.

Me too but aren’t they all money pits?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Letting credit card debt build up, more than once. It's so hard to dig out from!

Repeat offender too!

[Anonymous]

Mine was probably meeting my ex. But I made the mistake young enough (24) that I've recovered from that mistake.

However it does still feel like I was stolen from having a loving partner with kids at a young age and a home earlier. I do have a wonderful husband but we've been battling infertility for years and it's heart breaking.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Mine was probably meeting my ex. But I made the mistake young enough (24) that I've recovered from that mistake.

However it does still feel like I was stolen from having a loving partner with kids at a young age and a home earlier. I do have a wonderful husband but we've been battling infertility for years and it's heart breaking.

The thread is about financial mistakes...

[Anonymous]

Money mistakes are inevitable but how do you not perseverate on them and move on. I just made one that’s decently big but not going to affect my life in the long term, and I still can’t stop beating myself up over it.

[Anonymous]

Not hiring a fee only financial planner earlier. Or at least reading blogs. Just thought we had enough at each stage and would continue to have enough.

Waited too long to save for college, then did prepaid VA 529 instead of Invest 529.
SAHM did not do any individual retirement savings.
Car loans w higher interest
Private school
Private college
Not investing enough - keeping way too much in emergency fund

[Anonymous]

Marrying my long term partner in the forlorn hope that the relationship would get better. Which of course led to divorce, which led to losing a whole lot of assets.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mine was probably meeting my ex. But I made the mistake young enough (24) that I've recovered from that mistake.

However it does still feel like I was stolen from having a loving partner with kids at a young age and a home earlier. I do have a wonderful husband but we've been battling infertility for years and it's heart breaking.

The thread is about financial mistakes...

I can't speak for PP, but my infertility battle cost over $100k. Starting earlier probably would have saved us most of that, if not all.

[Anonymous]

A lot of these “mistakes” are just hindsight about timing of selling/buying or not buying. But, those were probably reasonable decisions at the time.

I think of “mistakes” more along the lines of what some commenters are saying about not getting company match, buying time shares, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mine was probably meeting my ex. But I made the mistake young enough (24) that I've recovered from that mistake.

However it does still feel like I was stolen from having a loving partner with kids at a young age and a home earlier. I do have a wonderful husband but we've been battling infertility for years and it's heart breaking.

The thread is about financial mistakes...

Being a single Mom and having to pay legal fees at 28 was a huge financial drain, not buying a house young, and now spending over 50K on fertility treatments aren't financial mistakes?

Again, I now make over 400K / year own multiple homes, but that doesn't mean I couldn't have been doing that earlier and have more wealth than I do now. Also all the money in the world can't buy me a baby that is much desired.

[Anonymous]

I'm an immigrant, came to US over 20 years ago. All I knew about money was to save as much as I could, but didn't understand investing that much back in 2008-2010 to take advantage of investing in the market. I learnt a lot from youtube/books on investments/internet since then and have saved/invested as much as I could for the last 10 years. Also, we were renovating bathrooms/kitchen in our old house which costed a lot and the house wasn't worth them after all ( because of not so good schools). We put too much money into our old house renovations. We sold the house for much less that we thought we would get and moved to a better neighborhood when our child was about to enter kindergarten.

[Anonymous]

[mastodon]

Anonymous wrote:Mine was probably meeting my ex. But I made the mistake young enough (24) that I've recovered from that mistake.

However it does still feel like I was stolen from having a loving partner with kids at a young age and a home earlier. I do have a wonderful husband but we've been battling infertility for years and it's heart breaking.

I’m so sorry. I’m glad you found a great partner, but I understand fully how tough the rest of it is.

[Anonymous]

I am older. Just out of college, my father though I should learn about investing and set me up at a broker with the firm he worked with. They were few other options at the time; Vanguard existed but was not so well-known.

The broker convinced me to buy stock in a company that went under, so I lost all of my small investment.

That taught me two things: 1) always do your own due diligence and 2) always invest in low cost index funds. In retrospect, the price for these lessons was cheap.

[Anonymous]

Got a useless bachelor’s degree and worked “passion” jobs for too many years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not getting the screened in porch pre-pandemic. Will never be able to afford it now.

Seriously feeling this. Huge regret.

Biggest financial mistake was working in independent schools.