Tell me about your spectacular wastes of money

[Pennybubbly]

I'm feeling physically sick.
I placed an order overseas for a move-coveted Christmas present and paid and obscene amount. The goods arrived and they're the wrong size. (Kind of my fault, kind of not). Worse still, the goods cannot be exchanged. My fault for not reading the small print. It's a company in the US and you can "re-sell" them on their website, so today I just spent another fortune shipping them back and listed them on the website.
I'm such a twat. Please tell me tales of stupid things you've done so I know I'm not the only one.

Hermes delivery to send some warhammer stuff for sale - recipient said it did not arrive . It apparently got lost in the warehouse - after many months ( dreadful customer service ) got a fraction of the value back . Will never use them again.

Dh took ds to buy a car after he passed his driving test. Neither dh nor ds know anything about cars, but they assured me 5hey knew what they were doing. They went to a wee backyard seller. Mistake!

Bought what looked like a nice wee car, and after 2 weeks took it to our garage to get it checked over. The car cost £2000 and needed £900 work done to get it through its rapidly approaching mot.

At that point dh was smart enough to call it quits and go to a proper dealership, trade in the recently bought car and get something decent. The decent place did give £1000 for the wee car as a trade in, but a decent car of a decent quality was more expensive. £1k down the drain.

Just thought of another one from a while back. I was a student still and quite new to using eBay. I bought a jumper from America which never showed up, except I waited so long for it I missed the window to complain to eBay so couldn’t get a refund.

My last house. I spent a fortune on it and sold it a loss.

I have dogs and thought that wooden flooring would be practical, we spent a small fortune doing the hall and living room and realised within 24 hours what a pain in the arse it is.
It only looks clean for 4.5 seconds and instead of just being able to vac a carpet in 5 minutes I had to sweep, mop and dry it then as soon as you stood on it you could see feet marks where the sun shone on it.
It was also cold and noisy.

The dogs detested it as much as we did and so it ended up covered in rugs until we saved up for a carpet.

I have an ongoing problem with not being able to tell the size of things from the pictures when shopping online so think I’m getting a bargain but when it arrives it’s smaller then realised. I mostly do it with the food shop.

Two new DG kitchen windows I hated instantly, not having realised that what I’d specified would mean that the wide bands of white plastic between the two openings, would be right at my eye level.
Had to get them taken away and replaced with non-hideous, single openers.
£600 down the drain and this was over 30 years ago!

@Gertie75

I have dogs and thought that wooden flooring would be practical, we spent a small fortune doing the hall and living room and realised within 24 hours what a pain in the arse it is. It only looks clean for 4.5 seconds and instead of just being able to vac a carpet in 5 minutes I had to sweep, mop and dry it then as soon as you stood on it you could see feet marks where the sun shone on it. It was also cold and noisy.

The dogs detested it as much as we did and so it ended up covered in rugs until we saved up for a carpet.

Thanks for that! I’ve often wondered whether we should replace carpet with wood, but never have, because I suspected that it would be much more of a PITA to keep looking presentable, besides being cold and noisy.

I have the opposite problem and tend not to spend money on things I really need. Spent years living in a grotty house because I didn’t want to spend the money painting it. It was so grotty we had to reduce the value of the house accordingly so I probably lost 5k.

years ago now, but still rankles!

Redid the kitchen, and decided on really fancy lighting - bendable tracks (2 - one over sink and one over dining area) and then bought all of these amazing murano glass fixtures for it. 8 if I recall correctly. It cost a fortune to install (won't talk about the most smelly of installers imaginable!), but went out after about a week. Got them back to review, and said needed a bigger transformer. That required a new electric box to be installed - bought, installed, inspected, permitted. Done. That went out in about 2 weeks. Replacement sought, reinstalled. Happened again in about 3 weeks. By this time we'd spent about 12k on this, and still didn't work. We finally bought some more fixtures (just as expensive, but no transformer needed) that worked and lasted for some years.

The very next week we saw that Ikea was suddenly selling similar fittings at a fraction of the cost. That. Stung!

I bought a conservatory.

That's it. It's OK, I do use it, it's nice in winter, but it really wasn't worth the money.

I’ve probably had 20 different building/carpentry/plumbing jobs done over 25 year. 2 were spectacularly bad, including one last week that I’m trying not to think about...

The biggest waste of money was getting married.

@Namechanger20183110

Not a purchase but a demonstration of stupidity.

Took out a credit card to buy our car. Don't know why, as we had the cash, but I felt like it was too much of a splurge, this seemed like the cheapest way to borrow it across a term. The deal was 24 months interest free for purchases - perfect - I'll pay it off at the end of the 24 months before interest gets charged.

Except we didn't actually purchase the car with the card, I'd transferred the available balance from the card to my current account and then paid the dealership from my current account. I didn't know that this is actually called a money transfer and the interest free period for that was only 6 months. I logged on to the app around 24 months later to see how much I had to pay off only to see that 18 months of interest had been accruing at 21% APR.

I can't believe I didn't know that, what's worse is that I work in banking. I couldn't even apportion any blame to the credit card company for not warning me that interest was going to start charging, as they'd text me one month before the expiry date and I seemingly had completely ignored it, there it was just sat in my inbox, marked as read!

I gasped and covered my mouth when I read this!!!

How much did you have to pay?!

Ugh I ordered a wedding dress, it was in a non-standard colour and it was made to measure. I have no idea why I ordered this, it was completely not my style.

When it arrived in store I tried it on, said thank you very much, paid for it, took it home, and got my sister to list it on Ebay. Luckily it was in the hundreds, not thousands. I got almost nothing for it.

I went and bought an ordinary dress for much less money.

@MaybeAMoaner

My DH got his annual bonus of £5,000 (worked his socks off for that) So we Bought a new bathroom suite and some big expensive tiles (we are not rich in anyway but we thought we would for once ‘treat ourselves’ and get a quality item)

A friend recommended a retired tiler to do the tiling.
This is where it all went wrong.

He arrived and he looked about 80 year old.
Within the first hour he had a poo in our only toilet that stunk the whole house out so badly that our 3 year old was shouting “urr mummy what’s that disgusting smell”

He then dropped the tile from a height which landed into our new bath which caused a massive hole in the bath.
He walked out and we have never seen him since and we had stupidly STUPIDLY paid him half up front WHY!!!!

So we are left with a brand new bath with a giant hole and about 3 tiles stuck to the wall and the memories of the smell of his shit lingering through our house.

We then got a bath repair man out as we couldn’t afford a new bath.
He done such a bad job he even said “sorry I’ve royally fucked this up. I won’t charge you for what I have done- bye”

We had to get a loan to have the whole mess sorted and are still paying now 3 years on.

I'm so sorry this happened, but the poo bit literally made me scream 😂

Close to £2000!

Yeah I have 2 horses and 1 on the way. I wear clothes donated by richer and more sensible friends and family. Never spent more than £50 on a pair of shoes and keep them until they fall apart years later. Horses get brand new shoes every 5-6 weeks and cost £80-90 depending on whether I need studs.

Dh vs I hadn't been anywhere since having dc2. Quite wanted to see a band, missed out on official tickets of course so used viagogo (bastards). Got panicked by the red ticking clock, speed purchased 2 tickets. Purchase went through. Only when I read the confirmation email did I realise they were £300 EACH, not for the two... £600!!! Honestly I was horrified for months and months and did not enjoy the gig either.

@Namechanger20183110

Close to £2000!

Just in interest??

@ Namechanger. You still have to pay monthly, you don't pay the balance off at the end of the term though, the entire thing has to be paid off regularly over the 24 months. So don't understand how you only logged onto the app after 2 years. Your credit score would of been ruined.

Nothing crazy. Maybe that £50 I paid for a dress for dd that's she's never worn. She doesn't like dresses apparently

4 rounds of privately funded IVF. Not only did it cost thousands, it completely ruined my body and worse still my mind. I have my marriage and my career - just. They also looked in jeopardy at one point.

@lovemydogsmorethananytning.

Yes I made repayments monthly for a set amount, I set up a direct debit at the very start which was collected monthly, I had no need to log into the app

Currently in a hotel in a foreign city with DSIS, having missed our flights because we left it too late to get past (woefully inadequately staffed) security. Replacement flights, hotel, extortionate car parking charges, missing meetings tomorrow, alarm set for 4am…Probably equal to the cost of the rest of the holiday + massive dose of mortification. Thank god DBIL and DH will never enquire as to the costs and think it’s hysterical that our just-in-time strategy has had its comeuppance.

Buying our second flat - so approx £400k. Our first morning there, while we were happily making our first breakfast there, music came blaring through from next door. DH and I looked at each other as our hearts sank. Lasted not even a year before we cut our losses to escape classic psycho neighbour from hell. That was a shit year.