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?

I’m considering taking my mother off our family mobile contract and just setting fire to a tenner every month as I’ll still be up on the deal.

Not a huge amount of money, but twice, on the M42, I have been trapped into the lane that takes you straight on to the M6 Toll and had to pay £5 each time.

A fiver to have to travel extra miles and waste time and fuel to get back where I was going, as it's not straightforward to get back on to the M42 when leaving the M6T at the first opportunity.

It's not even there for the benefit of the millions of us Midlanders who live in our part of the region, as the route of it just takes you massively out of your way and would add time to your journey. Great for people from the south-east travelling North, though, so that's OK, then...

I smoked for more than a decade. Thousands, literally set on fire.

This week I shelled out £60 on a parking ticket because I parked a wheel width outside the bay FFS

How do you get trapped?

The junction is quite confusing and if you don't know your way around you can get boxed in by big trucks and unable to get back in the right lane. It has happened to me as well.

Thanks, I’m not familiar with it.

2 month upfront for full horse livery to hold a stable/field until I was ready to move him. Came to just over £800.
Id already decided I wasn’t moving him there before I’d got to the bottom of their drive 😭

IVF.

I had two miscarriages and a divorce to show for about £20k.

So, yeah.

By a continuous line of traffic to your left, especially lorries which obscure the signs. It's designed so that you kind of have to peel off left to stay on the M42 and continuing more 'straight on' takes you right on to the M6T.

They could do with marking out specific lanes from much further back, rather than telling you to use the same lanes for both and then leaving it very late to warn you and tell you to move with very little notice - but who knows what 'arrangements' might have been made with the investors in the M6T?

I'm not even saying that they necessarily wanted to catch people out; maybe they just assumed that everybody would want to use their fancy new motorway and not the boring ordinary 'provincial' one.

Mini disk player and a mini disk stereo!

Too many DVDs that are now worth like 10p

A Dyson air wrap that thankfully started making a burning noise so it could be returned

Beats and an apple watch that got nicked by a colleague in work!

A Nintendo switch for my daughter which didn’t get used at all!

Hoverboard for my daughter! sold it in the end.

a Violin and electric drum kit for my daughter both barely touched

Thanks - you got there first and explained it more succinctly than I did afterwards!

My husbands sports bike that is currently serving as a nice decoration in our garage!

An expensive annual gym membership paid upfront for DH that he used on literally 2 occasions.

Still pisses me off.

I had laser surgery for short-sightness at 37 and didn't need to wear glasses again until I developed long-sight in my late 50s. I would say it was probably the best money I ever spent. I know this thread is about a waste of money, but there's no way I'd include laisik in that.

Bought a load of leggings in different colours, just before the wide trousers look came in...
Cars: had my old car from new till it finally conked out, over 14 years. Loved the old boy.
Decided I would do the same sort of again, got a Honda Jazz on 0% interest, PCP finance, realised after 3 months that I hated the thing, had nothing but bad luck with it, at the 3 year mark I handed it back without a backwards glance, £15k down the drain.😡
(Yes I know a lot of people love their Honda Jazz cars!)

I paid a lot of money (can’t remember exact cost) to a painter to have our woodwork painted white about 3 years ago now. It has chipped very badly and is literally peeling away. It’s obviously too late to ask for a refund or correction, but it shouldn’t have happened within 2 years. I don’t know what went wrong because he is well regarded and used primer and 2 coats of branded paint, maybe even a third.

We bought cheap carpets and underlay when we first moved in. It was like walking on concrete. Replaced them all with expensive underlay and carpets as soon as we could afford to. Would never again buy cheap.

Whitening toothpaste

Bought ds a very expensive VR headset one Christmas. He has only used it a handful of times. Thankfully Dh paid for it

I bought a foundation recently and it’s far too pale. I was about to throw it out but gave it to dd, who probably won’t use it either

Gym equipment and a bike several years ago. Both are gathering dust and cobwebs in the garage.

Heels. I used to love buying and wearing them up until about 5 years ago. I just can’t wear them anymore. Luckily they are gone out of fashion anyway, but I’m left with something like 20 pairs that I know I’ll never again wear. Some of them are unworn.

Having to pay the main dealer to 'fix' the sensors on my car every time one of them goes off when there's nothing wrong.

Despite checking my tyre pressure every week and replacing tyres as necessary, my tyre sensor lights up within a fortnight of being fixed.
I take the car into my local tyre place, they check there are no punctures etc, confirm that the tyre pressure is fine. I have to pay anything between £30-60 for the main VW dealer to run the software to turn the sensor light off. I've had two of the sensors replaced (£400) and still the problem goes on. It must have cost me £1k over the last four years. I now just drive around with the tyre sensor lit up.

Wool. Started knitting to quell my anxiety during covid. Became addicted.
Now have suitcase full of oddly shaped shawls, wrongly reckoned tops,
and a variety of unravelled ephemera. A fortune.

This is exactly how you get your M6 Toll badge!

25k🙄 My wedding. My exH was kind enough to let me know after 3 months that he didn't really want to be married to me...

My satnav says "Right, Right, Right" about 30 seconds before it says "Bear left, Bear left". The road layouts seem to be designed for folks who know their route like the back of their hands.

If you are still up for knitting, remaking some of your things, knit baby blankets. They don’t have to be that big, square or rectangular and look online for organisations sending them to Gaza and Ukraine. Local groups collect them for prem babies too.
You can also knit hand warmers and post to South Africa.
Knitasquare.com

I don't have one of those, and the breville one I just bought was nice and cheap. Very cheap after using the clubcard vouchers.

Just gave 40k cash to a builder for the first stage of building our house... then the mortgage fell through because of the broker and now we have a field with a load of concrete in the shape of our house that we'll probably never get to build, our life savings are gone and we'll be stuck renting forever! 🙃