What's your most expensive moment of stupidity?

[HangingOver]

Cheer me up MN.

I visited DF for the first time since moving a loooong way away on the train this weekend. The train fares were over £200 all in but worth it to see DF. Raced to the station today to get the connecting train home and realised the return journey I booked was, in fact, yesterday. Minutes to spare and only first class seats available. £198. So my two days with DF cost me over £400. What an absolute wally! Am trying to channel my inner Love Islander and just say "it is what it is" (and obviously being grateful I actually had the money in my account to buy it). I was trying to think back and I think this is probably my single most expensive incident of stupidity (the one time the waiter accidentally charged my card €300 instead of €30 not counting as that was his fault).

Tell me yours while I drink my fifth cup of free tea.

Got on the wrong train to the airport in Barcelona and missed our flight. Had to find an hotel (it was late) and book new flights the next day (Barcelona-Munich-Uk), cost about £1700 and Do had to take an extra day off work and ds school.

Josh Widdicombe, on his podcast with Rob Beckett, says his Dad advocates a £1000 stupidy tax per year. Thats how much you should expect to lose through fuck ups. Makes ne feel better.

Just before Xmas MIL came for dinner. I was cooking and chatting to her as I stirred a pan on the hob. I switched the hob off at the bank of switches on the wall because it’s a stupid hob and beeps otherwise.

That evening we realise the boiler isn’t working.

It’s an old boiler so not unexpected. £2,500 for a new one. I’m stood in the kitchen talking to the plumber who tells me how weird it is that the power switch for the boiler is over by the hob………

I’m now convinced I turned off the wrong switch, it wasn’t broken and I’d just turned the power off, and I’ve never told DH. I reasoned it needed replacing anyway. 😳

My (now) husband renewed his passport and had it sent to his parent’s house (we were at uni at the time). His mum popped it in the post, no recorded delivery etc. It never arrived and we lost our money on flights to Paris. By the time we realised it wasn’t coming, it was too late/expensive to fix.

Admittedly I did not go through with it, but at university I was going to go to the British museum for a study trip and go during premium time, rather than plan in advance to get cheaper train tickets, would of been around 250, for the study day.

@Calmyertits

Dropped a tin of green paint out of my loft hatch all over my wool CREAM landing carpet. And my daughter... completely ruined it and still not replaced it after we had to rip it up, so got knows what it's going to cost as the stairs will need doing too. The more i tried to clean it up, the more mess i made. Took nearly 3 hours to clean up and i still find paint on stuff

Couldn't you claim insurance to have it replaced?

Travelling to a hotel in the UK I decided to tidy my handbag. We stopped at a cafe for a comfort break, and I threw some tissues into a bin outside. I forgot that I had at the last moment before leaving the house, I had wrapped a pair of diamond and blue topaz earrings in a tissue. They too went in the bin, never to be seen again. Didn't realise for a couple of days. I ws extremely upset to say the least.

Got pregnant 😂

This isn’t much compared to some people on here, but it has been annoying, and all my own fault.
I am a rabid collector and am on a forum dedicated to the relevant subject. Someone PM'd me to offer a sale of an item that I was after.
So, like a fool, I made an arrangement to pay them, including shipping from abroad, and after exchanging several messages… nothing.

I have claimed most of it back from my bank, but I am surprised and annoyed with myself for falling for it. There is a sort of acquisitive haze which descends upon collectors, and all caution and good sense goes out of the window. Daft me.
I also wish them a plague of boils.

I sat on my spectacles last week and broke one of the very expensive lenses.

Oddly enough, I can only remember the stupid things that DH has done that have cost us money / been a right pain in the ass.

Got on a train, insisted that we put the bags in the overhead luggage rack.. got off the train without the bags.. including 3 new pairs of expensive kids snow boots.. we were short of cash at the time, it hurt.

Key stress: DH moved the car keys from my bag to his, without telling me, totally stress me out until he told me. He then managed to lock the keys in the car.. had to break a window to get in.. window had radio antenna wires in it.. cost nearly €350 to replace.

DH insisted on buying a sports car for our wedding.. I loved it at the time, less so when we lost £8K on it 2 years later when we had to sell it as DS came along and it was a 2 seater.

He has also left house keys on the train... had to break a window to get in.. passports in a hotel because he insisted on sleeping with them under his pillow rather than just leaving them in my bag, passport and boarding card at the scanner in the airport, passport in the seat pocket, expensive watch at a campsite wash hand basin, phone in a seat pocket on the plane... I still have to stop him moving my things and putting them in overhead lockers, in his bag, in safe places when we are not at home. At home it is me who can never find my keys, wallet, phone but those dramas while stressful have less expensive consequences.

Wow.. that was therapeutic!

@NoProblem123

A friend who’d been working back to back shifts in Scotland with her husband for months on end, for a treat booked a dinner, bed & breakfast in Blackpool with a evening show.

They arrived late afternoon so decided to have a pre-dinner nap. They slept right through dinner, the show, and the whole night. They woke up in the morning, promptly fell out over it, and drove back to Scotland in silence.
£100’s for a long drive and a sleep.

That's hilarious 😂

I booked the wrong day on a return flight. I had to pay nearly £100 to change the flight unless I wanted to have a visit that would have lasted about 30 minutes by the time I got through arrivals and turned round to go back through departures.

I also got scammed which cost me nearly £3k. I don't like to count this as a moment of stupidity as it seems to absolve the scammers from their wrongdoing.

@tgt123

Buying a Range Rover Sport (second hand).

It breaks so often that I have to shell out for the expensive warranty, many insurers (LV I'm looking at you) now refuse to insure it as it's so easy to nick. The garages never answer or return your call as all the other RR drivers are trying to book their faulty cars in. They then want you to pay £600 diagnostic fee each time they look at the fault (which the warranty people confirm they will reimburse if there's a fault but the dealers refuse to admit for some unknown reason).

My most recent fault was the rear passenger door stopping latching so just kept swinging open near pedestrians every time I turned a corner. Crawled home, we got it shut and the garage couldn't open it again. This is but one of many.

On top of that, even if you're a considerate driver (which I try to be), everyone treats you like you're a total wanker (appreciate that it is stupidly wide).

That aside (ahem), I love it but never ever again. I'm (genuinely) buying a Skoda next time.

Someone's probably already suggested this @tgt123 but is it worth buying yourself an OBD2 reader? Mine saved me an absolute fortune when I had an older sports car which threw the engine light for minor stuff about once a month, meant I could read diagnostic codes myself and then decide whether she needed a mechanic or not. The port is supposed to be universal, under the steering column, and mine's a Bluetooth version that works with a free app :)

Just because £600/error made me wince for you!!

Years ago I saved up all our Tesco vouchers to get expensive theme park tickets in France for the 5 of us, as we were staying in a holiday home out there. I triple checked everything when packing, and still managed to leave the tickets in the UK. The kids were teenagers at the time and really disappointed. I was in the bad books for a while.

£14,000

Scammed by a double glazing salesman and never got it back

I booked a round-trip flight with the return the same day as the departure instead of one week later. By the time I noticed, it was too late to change it - I had to cancel the return flight and then re-buy it for a different date, at full price. That was an 800-USD mistake.

Bought the train tickets for me and 2 friends to travel from London to Scotland 25 years ago. We were all in our 20s and skint. Put tickets on sill (for some unknown reason) of open window of my flat. Big gust of wind. Bye bye tickets. Had to buy them again on my credit card. Took months to pay off.

@LemonDrizzles

Brand new Hobbs dress. Silly Indian sauce stain at lunch at work. Tried to blotch out with fairy. Completely ruined it. Oh but I still wear the dress!

Oh nightmare. Could you dye the dress a brand new colour (to cover the stain?).

Bought a professional grade piece of restaurant equipment for my DH's birthday. It was a ridiculously lavish gift that I couldn't really afford, but he'd had such a shit year and he's so lovely, always goes without for everyone else, and absolutely loves cooking and has always dreamed of having one of these, so I thought it would be worth it.

Turns out I ordered one from another continent, which was not incompatible with our electrics. DH shrugged it off and said it was ok because we could find a transformer to run it through, which we did, but that cost several hundred dollars and the transformer is huge and we discovered it overheats easily so it makes the equipment basically unusable in our tiny kitchen.

Tried to send it back for a refund but as I'd so diligently planned all of this months in advance, they said no.

We still have it sitting in the cupboard. A grim reminder of my stupidity. And yes, I know about sunk cost fallacy and no, I still will not be getting rid of it. I just can't let it go.

@NoProblem123

A friend who’d been working back to back shifts in Scotland with her husband for months on end, for a treat booked a dinner, bed & breakfast in Blackpool with a evening show.

They arrived late afternoon so decided to have a pre-dinner nap. They slept right through dinner, the show, and the whole night. They woke up in the morning, promptly fell out over it, and drove back to Scotland in silence.
£100’s for a long drive and a sleep.

This is similar to mine made massive effort for a friend's wedding including new dress, borrowing Dad's more reliable car and booking the posh hotel the wedding was being held in.

Drove 3.5 hrs to Bristol, saw the ceremony, went for a quick nap after the wedding breakfast so I'd be refreshed for dancing later and woke up about 10 the next morning... to a bunch of worried messages from the bride

Easily a £400 spend for that admittedly lovely sleep...

I can beat yours OP, unfortunately. I was in between jobs, and hadn't gotten around to renewing my car insurance. The car was worth $15 thousand dollars and I was still paying off the loan. I thought 'oh, I'll be right, I'll renew it next month'. Unfortunately driving to a job interview I was involved in a bad car crash, my car was written off. I only got $500 for the car when I sold it to the wreckers. It was worth fifteen thousand dollars. So, a $15 thousand car written off and I ended up with no car and just 500 dollars. Luckily dad was able to talk the car finance company around to writing off the debt, otherwise I would have been paying around $230.00 a month for a car that I didn't have, for another 2 more years.

Moral of the story is clearly that you should always, always make sure your car is insured, no matter what you have to go without to do so. It's a very hard lesson to learn.

My current car now is, obviously, insured.

@NoProblem123 either that’s more common than you’d think or I am your friend . Except it was Manchester and we got the train. Was the best night sleep I’ve ever had, I think of it often. But waking up the next morning was like being shot out of a cannon, could not think what had happened.

@tgt123 I'm sorry but every RR I pass on the road where we are seems to be driven by a middle aged gangster.

Get a Skoda.

@MissingH0me feel so bad for you, but welcome to my life!

Rushed to spend 200 quid on a signed copy of an album from a Vegas-based collectibles website before being rapidly assured by fellow fans online that it was almost certainly fake. Never received the item, fake or not. Upon cursory research, the collectibles company is notorious for this, constantly changing its name and has always dodged attempts to shut it down. Entirely my own impulsive and gullible fault. Lesson learned.