I could have been rich! Biggest financial mistakes

DH sold his house to buy with me, mortgage wasn't huge but felt to much at the time to keep on so sold it for zero profit. Should have kept and rented out to students then sold. Still wouldn't be rich but would be a little more comfortable.

you can’t patent an idea
apple would have been working on it

I didn’t let DH buy £500 of bitcoin 12 years ago when we had very little spare cash. Apparently be worth around £70k now. Whoops!

Quite similar here

Lots of frittering I now have to make up for, fast

Also know a lot of older colleagues who sold off London flats when they moved out in once shitty areas that subsequently went through the roof..

It happens. Try to turn your mind to the present and future

Offered a job I wanted and a funded PhD in the same week. Accepted the PhD even though I had my doubts- should have listened to my heart rather than asking friends, because if you ask your friends, "should i accept [sensible-sounding job] or do [not-sensible PhD]?" they will all tell you to do the PhD as they assume that's following your heart, whereas my heart was saying "take the job!"

I was obsessed with the concept of theramins at the time and envisioned using touchscreens and pitch shifting to create a keyboard where you could slide from one note to the other as a continuing rising or lowering note. Bearing in mind this was a couple of years before apple even patented the multi touch capacitive touchscreen so the tech wasn't even available at the time and my patent searches couldn't find anything similar there is a good chance I would have had it granted. It was a little more complex than that but that was the gist.

Marrying for love 😂

He's good fun and easy on the eye though, so I console myself with that.

I wanted to invest in property when in my 20's - early 2000's. Proper strategy investing with multiple properties- I did all the study, research etc. knew what I was doing.

DH suddenly refused. Thought property was a bad idea. Too hard. Too much risk. I suspect his DM was in his ear. Well, property has gone up three fold here since then. It was incredibly cheap & we had the resources. I still get pissed off, because I've learned DH is crap with money & lost a chunk investing. I don't dwell on it. I learned to take over our finances fully & have paid off our current home & have a good pension pot, so we'll be ok. But in late 40's now & could have been retired.

Irony is DH hates working even more than ime!!

I regret selling my roadworthy air cooled 911 when it was just an old car, for.......£1800 !

An ex boyfriend of mine was a multi millionaire. A genuinely lovely man. He asked me to marry him but unfortunately I just didn’t love him like that (we were also incompatible in bed) and we split up.

he married his next girlfriend and they divorced 5 years later and she’s now also a multimillionaire.

i could feel jealous but then i wouldn’t have had almost 15 years with my husband who is very poor but makes my heart sing.

money isn’t everything.

I lost 250 bitcoins in an old computer that got lost in a move a few years ago lost passwords and keys words etc . I bought them as a joke for pennies 😭

This thread shows that the best time to get on the property ladder is always now (or as early as possible) and the best time to start investing is always now (or as early as possible).

Not sure about that, plenty of new build flats bought post Brexit that have lost value.

This thread shows that the best time to get on the property ladder is always now (or as early as possible) and the best time to start investing is always now (or as early as possible).

My regret is not starting a pension until I was 32. I could easily have double what I have now for no noticeable reduction in quality of life if I'd started at 21.

What functionality are you talking about?

I rented in an area that went on to become heavily gentrified. The building was sold and they offered priority buy to current tenants, 80k at the time. I was barely out of uni and 80k seemed like insane money, it never occurred to me to reach out to an older relative or anything.

My flat now would have been worth over 1M. I try to not think about it because it’s pointless, but what really kills me is that it was completely gutted, turned into a shitty IKEA lookalike Airbnb.

🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲

I could have bought a studio in the Barbican or a zone 2 one bed - obvs went for the one bed that turned out to have all sorts of problems and sold it for 30k less 3 years later.

Also should have put a significant inheritance in stocks 15 years ago instead of various cash accounts. Am now moving most of it into stocks to bolster my p!$$poor post divorce pension pot.

It's not worth regretting the past like this.
Around 20 years ago I came up with a novel use of technology to make music using new to the market tech. Considered parenting it but never got round to it. This was before the rise of smartphones. If I had patented it I would now probably now be being paid by every smartphone manufacturer because the same functionality is on every single phone sold in the world. Honestly I'm just not the entrepreneurial type and I've got a pretty good life still!

Always pros and cons...... shoulda woulda coulda. Hindsight is 20/20.
I was offered a starter position of a great career in 2007 but I didnt feel confident so turned it down and took a more established position elsewhere where I felt more confident - but the caps on progression salaries were lower. I climbed the ladder but reached the cap. I ended up going back to the other organisation later anyway - going in at an established higher level and then climbing up to that cap. I should have done a bit more research initially. I often wonder if I would have gone up higher quicker had I taken the original job rather than going in later. But I dont know - its swings and roundabouts. Now I am doing some training and a qualification that may or may not boost my career and position / but I think if I would have done this sooner had I worked here earlier. But I honestly dont spend very much time thinking on it - I just crack on with what I have got.

I really should have hired a solicitor to negotiate my child/spousal support when I divorced my ex. Addressing pension sharing now and seeing his income compared with mine as a sahm has been quite shocking. I’ve applied for him to cover my legal costs this time … level the playing field as it were.

Getting married.

Not buying a central London flat with DH.
Had an opportunity at a very good price in early 00s. Think it was around £200k for a 2 bed. Umm'd and ahhh'd but decided we hadn't been together long enough to commit to buying a property.

I turned down a cash buyer offering the full asking price to sell a house at a lower price to a "nice couple" because I wanted it to remain a family home. The family pulled out, the original cash buyer had bought elsewhere, and the eventual purchaser messed us around and dropped their offer the day before exchange of contracts. Cost us over thirty thousand pounds. Twenty years ago. Still kicking myself.

I should not have bothered with uni, worked full time in my weekend job & got one of those 95% interest only mortgages. I would be laughing now!

I'm still pissed off at DH. He spent all his free time a few years ago when the kids were little (I'm talking hours and hours at weekends, bank holidays, evenings, even on his annual leave) doing unpaid extra work to design a database type system for something very niche for work. He wasn't asked to do it but the product they were using was outdated and not fit for purpose. He got obsessed with making it fantastic. It was probably a couple of years of his life just spent on that, while I was taking on the load at home (and working myself). I told him if it was that fantastic he needed to copyright it somehow and he could potentially make some money back (which I felt would be fair enough considering all his own time he'd used to produce it).

He said that as it was a public sector thing he was doing it for the public good yadda yadda. What happened? It started to be used throughout the organisation then it was taken on by a company that came in and asked to develop it. That company ended up polishing it up and now other public bodies are using it as standard. No doubt that company has made a large wodge of money out of it all.

Not getting round to paying a bit extra into my pension when I went part time for 15 years. Really kicking myself now. We could have afforded it but were busy with dc and just never got round to doing anything about it until a few years ago. Missed out on loads of growth and colleagues who stayed full time are retiring early now.