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?

Just before Covid hit, Senior rail passes for me & my husband, paid for the extended three year versions as well!
Didn't even get one use out of them & the railway company wouldn't give refunds. Grrrrr 😠

We bought a house

Spent money renovating the house

The house is worth less than the purchase price plus reno costs

I’m not overly happy here and wish we’d moved somewhere else

😹😹😹

Literally the same thing happened to me. I got so stressed about it as he loved the first term then refused to go.
What I learnt is to never sign up to any class where he doesn’t know anyone and that’s an ongoing thing as I might as well burn the money 🥴

you have to read 100 books on a kindle to offset the environment damage of one new book. regardless of servers its still environmentally friendly to use a kindle

I signed up for swimming lessons as I’m trying to learn to swim properly as an adult it totalled £600 for about 12 lessons but the instructors in my area for this company kept coming and going and there was huge gaps in between which caused a lack of continuity and I was unable to learn. Still waiting to be refunded for the last 6 lessons I was unable to take due to yet another instructor leaving.

Also paid about £450 to a fairly well known online trainer for 3-4 months of personal training . Discovered that really the meal plan and exercise routine they give you is the same as what would be generated by an app costing a fraction of the price. And she wasn’t a qualified PT. It was all very generic and communication with her was purely through the app.

Cancelled at the end of the subscription period in September but she took payments at the end of October and November in error. So i had to waste time seeking refunds each time and then eventually getting my bank to block her taking any more payments as she just kept bleating about it being a system error.

Not literally nothing but about 60% of the underpants I’ve ever bought. I must have a weird shaped body because they rarely fit so most don’t even get worn once. Then there’s not really anything you can do with them so they just stay in the drawer until I either throw them out or cut the cotton ones up for rags

Sorry, but that's incorrect. The vast amounts of water it takes to make microships. The mining of rare earths. Generating electricity to run your kindle and the servers. Updating your kindle as the battery and other parts die. A book will last far longer than an electrical gadget and can be used by lots of people - they are made for sharing, no?. A kindle is exclusive - you can't pass around the files on your kindle if you get them from Amazon. Paper is largely made from renewable or reclaimed materials. Glue can be (older books are glued with starch paste or render. Newer books are sometimes glued with a plastic-based glue). When a book is eventually past its useful life (100 years? I'm reading a book printed in 1912 today and won't be the last reader) it can be composted or burned. A kindle can be recycled, but it takes a lot of energy to do that. And lord knows the cables! How long do they last?

There's a place for kindle, and I do have one. It's great for reading (free or directly purchased) pdf and epub files. Handy when travelling - I read a lot and don't want to lug piles of books with me. But let's not kid ourselves that it better for the environment than a physical book.

Beautiful dresses for my daughter she never wore even once.

charity shops are overflowing with books. my local ones refuse to take books now. my recycling centre has a big sign saying they can't take books as they are harder to recycle made up of different component items. you have to cut donw trees use vast amount of water to make books. people buy more brand new books than they do second hand. you buy a kindle library. companies offset their carbon usage by using renewable forms of electricity. unless you exclusively buy second hand books and no one buys you new books as present kindle is still less environmentally damaging than books

re Kindle:
twice my amazon account was blocked as I changed the payment method ("for security reasons"). Thankfully each time I managed to unlock it but it was hassle and it didn't feel very safe - I needed to upload a photo/screenshot of my account numbers (last three digits). Compared to input data, this is probably not as encrypted.

If you buy a lot of kindle books, it could happen any time that your account is locked, perhaps if you have multiple users to it and someone messes up, or their security systems detect "unusual patterns" or someone tries to hack it.
Unless you manage to get it unlocked, all your bought digital files are inaccessible. If amazon ever goes bankrupt (not likely but not impossible), all your digital files will be lost.

If you have a different e-reader that uses pdf or other widely readable formats and you saved them in backup storage, the likelihood of their "survival" is much higher.

Maybe that's not a big problem when you have a lot of novels for a lower price which you already read and they just stay in storage, but if you buy a lot of non-fiction books for a higher price and want to work with them continuously, it seems risky.

Hello ! Welcome !

Same experience with our child but different after school club. I reminded her that we had already paid for the term so she needed to carry on with it until the end of term, otherwise we would deduct the club fee from her birthday money (a bit mean but it worked). After a long conversation, it turned out that she was annoyed at never getting the medal usually given to boys and she didn't always participate in games. Interestingly, without any interference from us, one evening she got the credit she was hoping for, received the medal and was delighted. She said she still wanted to do a different club but was more willing to stick it out until the end of term and there was no need for bribery.

Fashionable, sleek, beautiful expensive sunglasses... the bane of my existence! And if I don't lose them on the first outing, I scratch the lens! But not the cheapies NO they bounce back and resurface as soon as I summon them 😂

Umbrellas, plural

Left on buses, at bus stops, in GP surgeries, in shops, cafés and restaurants

Dozens of them

£220 on tickets for The Last Night of The Proms at the Albert Hall plus £250 on train tickets and £400 for a night in a posh hotel in Kensington and the Queen dies two days before the event which was cancelled.

@Kidznurse You should ask his maj for a refund!

Most people (I know) these days use a kindle or e reader App on an existing device such as a tablet or phone which is used for multiple other function and applications. Servers require vast amounts of energy to run no doubt but the format of a e reader book is negligible when compared to a media or video file or movie that will also be stored on a server for Netflix/whatsapp videos etc. so should we all go back to dvds and taking pictures. physical books are far worse for the environment than an e book will ever be. Most books are made from sustainable paper (not recycled). That means that trees will be planted to replace ones cut BUT how do you cut trees. Using machinery that uses diesel plus the diesel for people to access the forests. The diesel and petrol used to transport to the paper mills. The water used to process the paper. Then there’s the glue and cover treatments made from plastic. Again petroleum based. Then once the book is made, it’s packaged in plastic and boxed in more paper. Then put on a boat then a car to be shipped to a bookshop or distribution center to be purchased by a customer. There’s a huge environmental impact from that. All these processes use vast amounts of energy when compared to the energy used proportionally to store a book. Yes you have a physical item at the end of it that can be reused or passed around and I absolutely read using both formats.

On the energy and water used for microprocessors manufacturing yep huge amounts of energy and water but more and more the energy is coming from sustainable sources. If you look at Intel specifically they have energy goals for next 10/20/50 years. And the rare metals they mine to make chips. They’re going to be used just as quickly in a car or truck or a fridge or medical device or plane or a bomb just as quickly as a kindle

Oh god I added up once that I’d spent over the years about £15k on cigarettes really depressing, but given up now!!

£600 on an A level course for my ex wife. She wanted to do it, she kept going on about it. I paid from selling some of my shares. She claimed she was doing it. I even bought several books which she had asked for. That's another £200.

Turns out she didn't do it at all. 'It was a bit hard'. She lied for months claiming she was at it all day long on her days off. Even laying books and paper on the table to give the impression she was at it all day long'.

I've many examples of her lying...for another day. So yeh £600 and that was 20 years ago.

Cat bed & most cat toys. He ignores them all.

That stings, where abouts are you @STIAWH if you don't mind sharing.

Another one is on floaty dresses that look good for one wear before you wash them. Then look like a bag lady.

Also Toast dresses, not cheap but the look doesn't work for me at all.
Last time I wore one, I was asked if I was pregnant.

It seems like fruit and veg goes into my fridge to die.