What is your worst and most expensive financial mistake?

[HorseHeist]

Long time ago now, but mine was in my early twenties. Managed to buy two very unsuitable horses in succession over a short period of time They must have cost me thousands, to deal with the subsequent mess. Which was a lot of money going back almost a couple of decades.

I keep wondering if I'd put that money in a pension, what would it be worth now? I would have been off to a great start pension wise at an early age.

What stupid financial decision did you make, that sticks with you years later?

Buying a house in 2005 (with Northern Rock!) Selling in 2008 instead of holding on to it. Ten years later, the same house sold for almost triple the price while we were stuck renting as we'd wiped out our (small) deposit.

But you win some, you lose some - we didn't know at the time how far the market was going to fall, and were scared we'd be stuck in negative equity in an area we didn't want to stay in. We moved (and rented) in an area that we were much happier to bring our kids up in and have never regretted that decision.

No-one can predict what's around the corner.

Marriage. Specifically putting all my money from my flat sale into the family home. Then divorcing.

Not buying a house (with 100% mortgage) when I left uni. The people I know who did, made between 50-100% profit within two years

I didn’t start an NHS pension when I started my training, as I preferred having the money. Stupid.

Same here

Not me but a great-uncle.

Back in the 1960s, newlywed, he was freshly qualified in law and got a promising job in London. The young couple discussed where to buy their first family home - Hampstead (then, apparently, very faded and run-down) or Hayes (cheaper and further out, . They decided that rather than a small terrace in Hampstead, they'd get a much larger house and garden in Hayes.

Great-uncle reckoned, when he recounted this story to me in the early 2000s, that they'd probably missed out on a few million £ because of that decision.

I think I might be in the middle of it! Bought a house last year which had been on the market for ages, thinking that I wouldn’t be selling for a long time, so it wouldn’t be much of a problem for a while. My circumstances have changed and I think I will need to sell it soon as I need to move for work. In addition, something has just come to light that could cost thousands to fix and the house couldn’t be sold without doing it.

That said, neglecting my pension and income in favour of furthering my ex husband’s career in a country where I didn’t understand the divorce laws was quite costly too.

Still, onwards and upwards! I’m probably not going to be bankrupt unless something else happens….

I could've written most of your post tbh.

Wasted my 20s and 30s on losers and didn't bother with promotion at work for lots of good reasons at the time but now I'm being bossed around by kids who can't do the job even a 10th as well as I can. I'm retiring in a few years so not worth it now.

My current DH is a good'un but we were both in our 40s when we got together.

So many mistakes! I envy people who have got their lives sorted in their 20s.

Buy-to-let. Seemed a good idea at the time but turned into a total nightmare. The first set of tenants were using the place as a knocking shop but at least they paid their rent - neighbours weren’t too pleased though.

The second set only paid one month's rent, racking up a huge backlog of debt. I did my best to be accommodating but eventually I had to evict them. In return, they totally wrecked the place. Cost me a small fortune to put it all right and I never recovered a single penny of the rent I was owed.

In the end I just used to rent the driveway out for parking but having a vacant property in London isn’t a good idea so I sold the place to a property development/management company just to get rid of it.

Not being born a few yrs earlier!

Staying at a bad company longer than I should. I could have earned more elsewhere but I stayed out of loyalty and DH got a job there too. The business went into liquidation which was awful for us, we both scrambled to get work elsewhere, got into debt and out of desperation ended up in lower paying jobs. This cost us 10 years to get ourselves back on track.

It was DHs Dad but thank you. He was Red through and through.

believing in the government.
a few years ago (2015) we were looking to exchange our HA rented home for a council home so we could use the right to buy discount and buy our first home. Would have cost about £100k. But then David Cameron promised to extend the RTB discount to HA homes so we decided to stay out and buy our home. 8years later we are still waiting as, although now part of law, it is still not available to us, and so we are looking at buying a house on the open market - for around £400k. I really wish we’d done it 8years ago as we would have around £150,000 equity by now.
Lesson learnt? Never believe politicians

Marriage here too. I’m still happily married but it was the cost of the wedding and how much we spent on it. If I’m honest I wanted a fairytale wedding and to feel like a princess - but at what cost! I did suggest having a smaller wedding but my mil said no way as she didn’t want any of her side of the family to feel put out - she didn’t contribute a penny anyway as she’s never liked me. In hindsight I wish we had got married abroad on a beach somewhere beautiful. It would have been a lot cheaper. We could have shaved thousands off our mortgage from what we would have saved. There’s no point dwelling on it now though you have to move on.

Lighthearted but.....Settled down in my twenties with someone who was averagely progressing in his career and hopeless with money rather than going for the gorgeous city lawyer who was chasing me at the same time and wondering why I was out of his reach. Backed the wrong horse.

Marriage. Helping him out of debt. Divorce.

Investing in a blockchain mine :/ I got quite a hefty sum taken because I hadn't read the contract thoroughly. Luckily I hadn't invested more than I could really afford to lose, but it was still a blow to my finances and left me feeling very silly.

Picking the wrong solicitor to help me with my dad’s estate and house sale - wrong advice, lost documents, incompetence and outright lying!

Being a SAHM. And no, my children WOULD have been better off in nursery.

This is probably a whole new thread "people you should have dated and didnt". A city type friend of mine invited me for drinks in about 2007, in some London bar. Met one of his loaded stock broker friends, totally clicked, had so much in common. I was told a week or so later "He really likes you, you should go on a date" and my response was something like "Oh that's nice" as I continued to date total losers. What was I thinking!

A few

1. marriage and the subsequent £100 K to divorce him and fight numerous court cases
2. Aged 23 (yes really) armed with a phD from oxbridge was offered a job of a lifetime - ridiculous looking back on it- working for a top company, £45K a year, free accommodation and allowances, over the other side of the world (Australia) doing research that I loved, 4 free return flights a year and free healthcare - and my abusive parents had a hissy fit and my narc mother cried her eyes out saying she couldn’t bare it and not to see me - until I declined it - 1 years later they buggered off to the US for 3 years with no warning followed by 2 trips around the world.
3. A hot tub for £700 during lockdown - kids got allergic reactions even though everything was chemically tested carefully then found out - they have skin allergies - put it in the garage - lockdown ended - went to sell it but mice had eaten it ….. paddling pool only from now on!
4. vet bills honestly - he’s worth every penny but one of them eating crap in lockdown from a locked room 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️£2500 I wanted to rename him from Bob to Bill

Marrying my ex.

I'd owned my own home for 16 years when we got married and we continued to live in "my" house. His attitude changed once we were married (we had our first real argument 2 days after the wedding) and he gradually became more and more abusive.

Ten years in, I told him I wanted us to split up and asked him to move out. His first words were "How much are you going to give me?"

He refused to move out, and there was fuck all I could do as he wasn't physically abusive and I couldn't afford to move out myself (at the time, emotional abuse wasn't recognised in the way it is now). Eventually, when I was in a new relationship, he started proceedings for divorce on grounds of adultery.

By the time it finally got to court, we'd been married 15 years and he was awarded £97.5k, just under half the equity. The only slight consolation was that the house had gone up by approx £50k since we'd had it valued for court, plus his legal bills were over £20k. We'd both have been a lot better off if he'd accepted the £40k I offered him 5 years earlier, the fuckwit.

Not haggling hard enough on house purchases, definitely cost me over £100k. 2nd time round I took pity on a widow, being philosophical I suspect the money meant more to her than me. Nonetheless it wasn't wise.

Marrying my husband

Going travelling and giving up my job with a big company I could have been working with for all this time. Then choosing to train in a public sector role. Grrr why didn’t I stay in the private sector.!

oh and buying a house a year before financial crash 🙄🙄🙄🙄