Money you may as well have set on fire

[Snickernoodle]

Like you literally got NOTHING for it.
DD wanted to go to drama club for ages. Loved the first term. Asked if she wanted to do the second term. No sooner had a I sent the money across she came and told me she didn't want to do it and has been moaning and tantruming about it ever since. £90 completely wasted. I'm feeling pretty salty about it atm. Help me feel better about it with your wasted money stories?

Big holiday in America, last stop Las Vegas, didn’t read the itinerary properly, left the hire car in the hotel car park for 3 days, took it back to car hire place at the airport the day we flew home. Three weeks later get a bill for £250 for late return, we should have returned it as soon as we arrived in Las Vegas, and got a taxi to the hotel, I mean who needs a car in Vegas?
Comes under Idiot Tax!

Many moons ago when dh and I were younger, we were going through the very early stages of applying for a house to rent through an estate agent.
We had only just filled in the application (not sent it) when our guarantor pulled out last minute due to cold feet at having to go through a hard search on their finances. We had only just paid the EA the £300 admin fee(!) & they literally hadn’t done a thing at this stage. We couldn’t find another guarantor so had to pull out, but the greedy bastard EA kept the £300!
I was livid. We were only in our early 20s, it was such a lot of money to us, they didn’t even lift a finger, but refused to hand it back. We were so polite at first but when we realised the greedy shits were not going to budge, I gave them a few choice words and left a bad review. It really soured my thoughts on EA for a long time.

Exactly 30 years ago - Got divorced at 24, managed to get all the equity in the house - a grand total of £7K (approx £17K now) - by saying I wouldn't touch his fire service pension.

I'd been talking about going on holiday on my own for 3 weeks/a month once I got the money. Not only had I been dealing with my own divorce, but my also my parent's long and horrible divorce, that took 3 years to go through. My mother had ripped through her financial settlement in next no time - she was spending money like she still had access to my father's ex-pat income. I had been diagnosed with severe depression...

During all this, my younger brother suggested we go back to Oz - my parents had moved us to the UK a decade earlier. I would get the 3 of us one-way plane tickets - cost £1K - and then use the rest of my divorce settlement to set us up in a rented flat. My mother leapt on this, she was heavily in arrears with her rent and also had high credit card debit...I then stupidly let her emotionally blackmail me into shipping all her furniture back as well...that cost another 2 grand....

Trying to make an already long story shorter, my £7K was gone within 3 weeks. 2 weeks after being back in Oz the shippers got in touch to say they'd underestimated how much stuff there was and we owed them another £1K...ended up having to ditch all MY personal effects to lower the bill. One month after the furniture arrives - we've been back in Oz 9 months - my younger brother announces that he's going back to the UK. My mother had been such a nightmare to live with that I'd had a massive nervous breakdown and had attempted suicide, so no way on Earth was I being left on my own with her. I managed to scrape together the plane fare and 3 months later I arrived back in the UK, homeless and with £50 to my name. I was homeless for 3 weeks until the local YMCA managed to persuade a landlord to take me on. My mother followed us back to the UK 6 months later, lasted a year and then returned back to Oz...

Less than 4 years later my ex H sold the house for 5 times what we paid for it. My younger brother years later admitted that when he'd suggested we went back to Oz, he'd meant just for a holiday...and where does he and my mother now live, and have done for 20 years? Oz...I've been on my own in the UK all that time.

Am I bitter? You better believe it! 😂

I sympathise with the sunglasses one, I have managed to break three pairs of Raybans over the years, my very cheap ones survive. Raybans are my only indulgence too, I'm terrible at spending money on myself, drove my late OH bonkers.

Snap!!!!

And Ive recently broached the idea of selling the gravitrax but he refuses. He's used it 5 times in 4 years... and I had to help build it every time otherwise he refused cos it was too long and boring (he has ADHD so was a bad idea anyway. Just wish he'd let me sell it!)

Warhammer I'm holding onto hoping he'll come to it when he's a teenager pike my DB did....

I bought some domain names before the deluge of new address endings which rendered them worth about £1 each.

For anyone with a diesel car, putting the number for fuelfixer in your phone is a wise move. Strangely, never happens when putting a tenner's worth in, just when you've brimmed.
Don't ask me how I know.

I've always thought that the first badge they should work to get is the Sewing On Badges one. Brownies, Cubs, the lot!

I have a wardrobe full of lovely velvet kimonos and silk kantha coats that cost me a bomb on ebay and etsy but I've never worn them.

This :( 4 years on and I cant even begin to think of how much its cost. And they love it so just have to suck it up

£500 quid I spent on a new bike for DS who had it nicked within a few months of starting uni and couldn't claim on his insurance because he didn't report it to them quick enough (he was waiting for the police to give him a crime number)

Not money but time! One of our daughters wanted a game Domino rally and at the time it was very popular, we spent many days, petrol and shoe leather to find it. It was such rubbish, far too light to do what the adverts showed, used once of 10 minutes then chucked into a cupboard.

I lost my designer sunglasses on the first day of wearing them. Since then I go with cheap ones, never lost a single pair. I also tend to scratch them easily.

Lost mobile phones on two occasions years ago.

Joe wicks membership which I didn't use due to bad health and many gym memberships.

The £174 we are paying BT every three months. Been getting TWO SECONDS of internet every hour. Less than three weeks after an engineer visit

The £350 for the big heavy-duty carpet cleaner that I bought from Amazon and that never, ever worked. Stupidly I hadn't tried it when it came, it was the middle of summer. I put it into the cupboard, brought it out in winter when the carpet was all muddy and - nothing. So the company wouldn't collect it to fix, I had to take it to some collection centre which was about thirty miles away; I didn't have time or the energy by then to bother. It went to the tip in the end.

On the other hand, my pony and my dog were the best things I ever spent money on, so I'll take that!

I booked tickets for the first night of the Edinburgh Tattoo, tickets for the Da Vinci exhibition at Holyrood, afternoon tea somewhere posh in the city and a few nights in Edinburgh. The Friday before we were going up our daughter who lives there rang Do you have tickets for the first night? Yes we do, why? Er, it's tonight! Luckily the other bookings were for the right date and the Tattoo office were able to resell our tickets and sell us a couple for the following Saturday, Unfortunately, we can't get you two together though. As I said, That's probably just as well!
As it turned out we didn't lose much bit it made me hyper careful in future.

Just got the air con regassed for £110 and turns out that wasn't the problem so it still doesn't work. Yay me.

Oh the famous MG head gaskets! My beloved MGF, my mid-life indulgence, was using a lot of water and OH thought there was a leak on a hose. When we took it into a workshop we were told about the head gasket problem, 'Get rid of it quickly before it becomes more obvious' was the advice from the mechanic who was OH's ex-pupil. We traded it in for a saloon and when we were due to collect the 'new' car and take my MG to them I stayed in bed sobbing and made OH go!

I think electric cars will prove to be the money pits of the 21st century.

£35 a month on swimming lessons for DD5. Been doing them for 2.5 years and she still up until recently made zero progress. Not the teacher’s fault - all others have moved up except her.

Turns out if I’d offered to buy her sparkly pens in the first place in exchange for actually trying, she’d have saved us a fortune.

A George Forman or similar works very well for paninis.

Almost 20 grand on private school fees for DD - attendance 5%. She didn't cope with transition to mainstream secondary and we thought the small class sizes and emphasis on creative arts would suit her better. Not her fault, she has autism and mental health issues, but to make it worse, by going private we have made it much more difficult for ourselves to get any support from the education authorities in regard to her autism. She wasn't diagnosed when we made the decision and we didn't know how the system worked. Wish we'd spent the money on a private psychiatrist instead. 😭

My ds and his girlfriend live in a 1 bed flat
They are expecting pfb in a few months and have done exactly the same thing
I'm staying out of it-theyll learn

Edited to remove the kisses my phone added for some reason

Jumped onto a metro link tram without paying so I wouldn’t be late for work. Of course inspectors got on and fined me £50. I couldn’t afford to pay it until payday, by which time it had increased to £350. Work had just introduced flexi-time as well, which I’d forgotten about in my rush for the tram. So it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d waited for the next one 🤦‍♀️
I was sick for my GCSE certificate evening and never collected them. Suddenly need them for a course and have had to fork out £120 for replacements.
My son dropped his Nintendo switch (not insured) in the bath after about a month with it.
I could go on and on 😣