Doesn’t have to be thousands of dollars. Just a thing you spent money on that turned out to be a complete waste.
Early in my software dev career I had a contract job at a young company called Microsoft. Without going into boring details, what I saw in terms of miscommunication, wasteful practices, and odd behaviors by overstressed managers led me to see it as a typical startup that was outgrowing its ability to run itself. At that time they were handing out full-time employment like candy - most of the programmers in my hallway got converted - but I left, because I didn’t think the company would go anywhere. This was two or three years before the stock went nuts and programmers there became millionaires in their twenties.
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.
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).
That’s pretty shocking - it sounds like the actual problem was being $255 short the and just never catching up.
Faceplanted off a Lime scooter. $6700 to remove and replace a tooth.
I’d argue that’s less a financial decision as much as it was a lack of coordination. Unless you were being paid to crash test like scooters.
I agree, an accident isn’t a “decision”.
Well, getting on the thing in the first place was definitely a mistake. I didn’t spontaneously become less coordinated when I got on.
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…
About 80% of my Steam library.
When I was young I bought a brand new motor cycle from a dealership. Did I mention that I didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle when I bought it?
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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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.
Overall, I guess this wins
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.
I’m sad I didn’t experience university, it sounds like a great time. Parties, drinking, last minute assignments…
I was young and dumb and didn’t know how to say no.
Timeshare.
It’s so hard to get rid of. Fuck that thing.
I was married, in my 40’s and listened to my now ex hubby #2 because his family had several. The payment was $600 a month… a second mortgage for a one week vacation? The timeshare, nor our marriage, lasted long after that.
How is that presented as good deal up front?
Well. Since his parents have theirs paid off, it’s a mere $1,000 a year maintenance. But no. Ours was primo Washington DC/NYC (we lived in Philly at the time) and he had champagne tastes on a soda budget. I did not trust my gut as I should have.
Maybe I’m lucky, but I just stopped paying the maintenance fees. It never showed up on my credit, the phone calls stopped years ago, and all I get is the occasional scam offer in the mail to help me sell it.
Ooo thats a rough one.
formatted my drive 2010 thinking the bitcoin scam would not last so long.
I knew about bitcoin so early that at the time there was still a “bitcoin faucet” website giving them away for free, but between procrastination and skepticism I never bothered getting any.
Me, I falsely assumed crypto would be regulated by now. Also got scammed out of the proceeds from a doge coin miner my peers and I had infected our school wifi with. Only learned jack all about mining for it’s relation to cryptographic mathmatics, ha.
Even though I knew about Bitcoin in 2009, I don’t regret not buying into it at the start. Either I would have sold off at a dollar, because it “couldn’t possibly go any higher than that” and then regret not holding onto it for the rest of my life, or I would be extremely rich and be a much worse person because of it.
I still have almost two coins in a corrupted wallet file I’ve never been able to fix from when I mined them on my crappy little laptop back then :-(
Wallet file from what?
Bitcoins are stored in a wallet file. My file got messed up. I’ve had this wallet.bat file for like 16 years now, just mocking me.
.bat? Did you mean .dat?
I meant as in what wallet software, there are multiple talking the same protocol. Unless you mean Bitcoin Core specifically (the og).
Yeah. Dat file. I do mean OG bit coin. I mined it back in like 2010 when they were worth next to nothing. Like 20 cents a piece. There were no forks.
It should be an sqlite database. The modern docs say so, I am not exactly sure if it was the case in 2010.
Is it bigger than 0 bytes? Try opening in https://sqlitebrowser.org/ . I don’t know if it uses SQLcipher (probably not), but if you are using the Windows installer you should probably tick that there just in case.
EDIT: just a thought, if you can’t get it just give it to me (not here tho, Tox
F857EB6604B99A58ADD0965CEDFCBF78CF0BDF939DA7290D8D84117D8DE30C3F91B5EA9226E8), I will try some basic fuckery on it and do splitsies. It can go in these ways:- Nobody gets your coins - sad
- I get your coins and lie - sad, but also you kinda didn’t loose anything
- I get your coins and give you ~1BTC - bliss
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I’m lucky to have only had access to crappy cocaine in my life. I think I did like 3 consecutive 8-ball weekends but felt like shit every Monday so I just stopped. Now I’m too scared of fent to even try to score some coke.
How much could a little spoon cost?
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Taste the meat not the heat
Gets the best of us
An old job where transportation literally cost me half my salary.
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.
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.
Not a big one, but surely the worst one. There was a “make your own perfume” stall in our college fest. I didn’t like the fragrance of most of what they had to offer. It took me time to pick one, but I picked one that I thought was the most unique one.
Then when I came home, I realised it smelt exactly like my dad’s car freshner.
Listened to the internet and held onto Gamestop for longer than I should have.
I still did ok, but fuck I could have paid off my mortgage.
To be fair, they trading commission did some really shady and imo illegal shit to cut the legs out from under the squeeze.
Rules for thee and not for…
Having also been part of the community but not letting the hype take over logic, I’m also convinced a lot of shady and illegal shit was going on.
And still is, on the stock market.
Oh, I mean it was fact. Not speculation. Like it was logged and announced and done out in the open. The sec changed the rules while it was happening just to stop it. Plus the brokerages that froze trading at several points.
We’re in agreement. Especially those freezes…
Awe man. I managed to minimize my winnings. Sold a call. I figured cool get some action. Yes, that was a 400% profit but if I had taken the opposite (buy the call instead), it could own a new car. Anyway. I’m happy you paid off your mortgage.
… I think you misread.
