Money down the drain - tell me your tales of misery!

[SomeOtherGirl]

Bad luck comes in threes, and I've had three money ones this week (the second one's not too bad)!

1- DH used a toll bridge that won't let you pay at a toll gate, you have to log on to the website when you get home. Guess what, he forgot - and used it in both directions. £80 fine coming our way! (And he wonders why I'm so neurotic about stuff! :-D )

2 - The toilet broke and needed replacing. I called a plumber and he wanted £160 plus VAT for the first hour. DH is currently redeeming himself for item 1, with a youtube 'how to' video and a toilet from B&Q. Dodged a financial bullet there! And shredded the divorce papers. Phew!

3 - But the most annoying one - I just mucked up an accommodation reservation in a really daft way that has made it cost an extra £130. Nothing I can do to undo the damage - I've tried, it is what it is - basically I lost out on a one-off discount. Urgh. That's a lot of money to me!

When this kind of thing happens, it makes me reflect on how difficult it is to save / earn money, and how easy it is to lose it, if you're daft enough (like us!!) For example, last night I spent three hours on the internet researching baby equipment to save £30 on the price of a baby item for imminent DC2. I was dead chuffed to have saved the money and was all pleased for a bit. That's three hours of an evening to save £30. How have I just thrown away £130 then?! What is wrong with me?

Now I'm wondering what I could have done with that £130, all the lovely things I deny myself in the interest of saving money.

*15 books for DC
*Probably an entire layette (if you still use that word!) for DC2
*10ish reusable nappies
*A total hair makeover including dye, perm and other glitzy stuff
*260 cans of diet coke
*A babysitter and meal and cocktails out on two occasions for me and DH
*A fancy upgrade on the pram I want to get for DC2 but can't justify
*A fancier phone next time I upgrade
*proper leather boots this winter
*A Rymek keyboard (total frivolity!)
*Petrol for four and a half round trips to see my DPs
*Tickets to go and see DPILs
*A lot of cinema tickets
*A lovely(ier) birthday present for DH
*Some clothes that aren't in the sale for once! (And therefore probably fit a little better)

I could go on :-D

Then I was thinking, hmmm, what could I do to make up that money, little by little - and I realised the world doesn't really work that way. I found 18p on the street the other day and felt I'd won !!!

So aibu to ask you to cheer me up and tell me the face palm moments when you realise you'd lost / squandered / wasted a load of money, what would you have done with the money if you hadn't lost it, and whether you managed to do anything to make it up in the end? :-)

Oh... paid an annual maintenance fee for my house alarm which has cost many times more than a new one

But , sorry 😐 your £92k of United fabric puts mine in perspective
OUCH

Booked to see an 80s singer at a concert near me. Booked other bands too . Tickets arrived. Realised I had ordered two tickets for said 80s singer. Managed to get gig to exchange for a voucher. Went to see 80s singer. He was crap. Couldn't use vouchers. Was well pissed off 🙄

Bought exH out of our flat during divorce. I agreed with his valuation, even though I knew it was top-heavy as I just wanted out. After I bought it I found out the lease extension was going to cost £18k. Bastard knew it too, he just blamed me for not taking more interest in the paperwork.

@MimiLaRue

I mis-spelt my son's name on a purchase of a flight to Dubai. It was a typing error- not that I dont know how to spell my kid's name lol.

Anyway, they wont accept flight tickets if the name is even slightly different from the passport so I had to buy another one at £800. I was gutted.

Cheaper to change name by deed poll

I love this thread

I’m always shitting money up the wall through mainly human error

It’s not just me 🙏

@veralynn

I've NCd for this.

92k on fabric I didn't use in the end. Despite best intentions. I can't even discuss it in real life.

Is there no way you can try to resolve no3 and get your room discount OP? I feel for you!

92 thousand pounds? Crumbs - how? Never mind me, I feel for YOU!

Renewed my passport in the January and then couldn't find it so in a panic bought a new one -another £72. 2 months later it turned up so I put it In the back of the cupboard. Booked a long weekend taster cruise from Southampton. Got to the terminal and got out the passports. Id only bought my 2 instead of my current one and sons. Had to turn round and go 3 hours back home. So that was the cruise cost wasted plus train tickets home
I'm always wasting money stupidly. I'm currently paying for 2 expensive phone lines in an office we rarely occupy
I buy nice things for the house and they quickly get trashed by dogs or kids

If the toll is the Dartford Crossing, they will most likely waive the fine on appeal, they have historically been very lenient. It happened to us and was stressful at the time but they cancelled the fine with no fuss. I recommend he pays the original toll fee ASAP.

@SomeOtherGirl

@Rumbletumbleinmytummy

I've a few from recently. Or DH has...and it's made me grumpy as fuck.

We have a limited company, last year our company confirmation statement was late ( DH was working insane hours and I was going through investigations for lung cancer) anyway, we were fined, this year I said the fine gets doubled if it's late again, we need to do it on time!
DH says, I'll do it! Dont you worry. Except he didn't. £1500 fine on our doorstep.

Then he says, babe, I'll sort our corporation tax this year, don't worry. Well that's good because I havent seen a bloody receipt for the last year. I told you I wouldnt be sorting it. Tax filing was late. £500 fine.

He earned 4 parking tickets for parking outside of our house in pur private bay last year. They spiralled to £1000 between them.

Oh and this ones joyous, he closed down our barclays business account in January to instead use a tide business account. Tide never got around to offering us the opportunity to apply for a BBL when Covid kicked off.

It seems like DHs mistakes are coming at a massive cost right now!

I think in general, women have the memoboard brains to better deal with things like this. My DH also gets lots of fines for parking in our own bay - but say the permit has slipped or whatever. I wouldn't say I have control of the finances, but I open the credit card bills and get them all sorted in time. Same for all bills and I also do his tax return. He's an amazing husband and spent his whole day off fixing the toilet today, but the paperwork is my domain. I feel for you. Fines are sickening and also belong in the swirly vortex.

@ArabellaScott

I like to browse ebay when half asleep. It annoys me that sometimes when something is actually dolls house sized that it can look real-life sized onscreen until it arrives with a disappointing tiny thump at your doorstep.

I came close to this last week. I wanted one of those fancy roof cages for my car, one came up when I was looking for other stuff on amazon £35. Mentioned it to dh who said "are you sure? They are usually a few hundred?". Checked again and it was for an RC land rover 😂

I do it regularly with my online shop though. Dh often asks what lilliputian treats we have this week.

@veralynn please tell us about the fabric! 🙂

Borrowed more money than was comfortable to buy our house.

My husband (who hates anything financial and will never look for cheaper bills, insurance renewals etc much to my annoyance) suggested we go with tracker mortgage from our bank. Was much more expensive than the fixed rate mortgage I found so I suggested we went with that and tied us in for five years (as we couldn't afford to pay any interest rate rises).

Six months later was 2008 financial crash and tracker rated dropped to almost zero. We were still paying over £1500 in interest per month and tied in with early repayment charges. Finally decided to remortgage but cost us about £40,000 in ERC and additional interest . And the worst thing was that all the times I have saved £100 etc from switching insurances etc by being more financially competent than my husband over the 15 years we had been together were totally dwarfed by this one wrong decision. Aghh!

I once left US $2,300 on a flight into Vegas. All my spending money for the entire holiday. Foolishly had removed the money belt to get comfy.

Delta even called the plane in flight (it had refilled and left) and the FA searched around the seat area but needless to say no one claimed to have found it.

Paid 8k for my first ever brand new kitchen that i had spent months choosing.
We went away for the weekend a couple of weeks later and while we were away a mains water pipe burst in the bathroom directly above, causing the ceiling to collapse as well as major flooding.
Then we realised that the insurance had expired the week before.
15 years later i still weep.
On another occasion i went to unlock my car and dropped my keys straight down a drain as i was getting them out of my bag. £200 down the drain effectively.

@SonjaMorgan

I left our brand new camera in a hire car in America that had all our photos on.

I once left my purse on top of the pushchair and some shitbag stole it whilst I was smelling scented candles in Wilko.

I got a parking ticket whilst going to get change for the meter. Made the most out of it though as I left my car there for 5+ hours.

I once bought a cheap laptop as mine had broken and ended up replacing in 3 months later as it was incredibly slow. I suppose the buy cheap, buy twice holds true.

My mom left her cellphone in an NYC taxi cab the winter after my grandfather died so many pictures if him "gone". A few days after we returned home to Pennsylvania, I got a call from a NY number on my cell .. a woman had found her phone in the cab and wanted to mail it back!!! So thankful! So she ended up with all of her pictures of her dad back!

£450 to a plumber to replace bath taps. These days, I know better. Or do I? Three small electrical jobs needed fixing. Guy quoted £350 to do them. I said OK, thinking they would take him the best part of a day. He did them in 90 minutes, obviously his lunch hour, obviously moonlighting from another job.

Put my car through a service and mot, think it needed a bit of work to get through the mot and put 2 new tyres on it. A couple of weeks later it would not start. Ended up back in the garage, apparently the problem was resolved. A few days later same thing happened again, this time paid for a new battery. Turns out it was a fuel injection problem and to resolve it would requie a lot of investigation and expense. I must have spent about £700 including everything on my car whose value was only a few hundred pounds. I ended up having to buy a new one. It still sits in my garage as I was keeping it for my son's if ever they needed an old banger. Needless to say it now wont even start up as the battery is flat and I drove it in nose first. It will be

@Sneakyfox try anusol (The one without local anaesthetic in it) and popping it back in yourself. It’s always worked for mine.

DH paid his self certified tax bill which was £19 so late that he incurred £1000 late payment fees. Somewhat more entertainingly, he reported putting a large tub of white paint on the passenger seat of the car leaning across from the driver side and then it somehow just fell out and smashed open onto the tarmac.
Two summers ago I treated myself and my DS to tickets at Shakespeare's Globe starring Mark Rylance as Iago in Othello. Except I forgot I'd booked the matinee rather than the evening, only realising at 4.00pm. I actually grieved about it for a week.
Bought flights to see my DBro in Germany and his new baby. Except rather than buying for Dusseldorf I booked Berlin... because I took a call from our German rep in Berlin half way through booking. I ignored the paper confirmation which came through door. Reader we went to Dusseldorf and had a fabulous Christmas because I forked out an extra £300. Just as well as Berlin and Dusseldorf are 100s of miles apart and not possible by any other means due to being so close to Christmas! I blamed baby brain.
Also got scammed by EHIC fake website - lost £15.
Bought tickets for Bruce Springsteen years ago before secondary selling sites were a thing - £50 each but was very pregnant and decided not to go - DH couldn't find anyone to buy ticket off him so he went alone.

It's my friend's birthday later this week (a big one) and I ordered her a few presents online to be delivered to her. I've just seen the PayPal confirmation for one tonight and it has my address as the shipping address rather than hers. I definitely entered hers originally (it came through correctly on the first email confirmation) but it looks like PayPal overrode it with mine 😔 . Now I need to figure out if there's any way to pay to get it to her on time once it reaches me, gah.

On a train to the evening reception of a friend and I had the card with $300 in that a group of us had all chipped in to get for them going travelling.

Guess where I left the card?

I got stitched up by the trading platform Etoro.
They still owe me €13,000+ despite an ombudsman in the country they’re based falling in my favour.
Apparently in Cyprus you can just say “I don’t agree with the ombudsman’s decision“ and you don’t have to pay what you’re told you owe.

Hitting the zero an extra time on the cash machine and getting 200 instead of 20.

Am on my way into town, so decide to go and pay it back on at the bank. Lose my purse on the bus. Was nearly 30 years ago but still pissed off with myself!

Booked a vip ticket to see an artist I love, front row, meet and greet etc etc. Then manage to double book myself onto a family occasion that I can't really not go to now I've committed, and unable to sell my ticket as I was going on my own and most people want to go to gigs with someone.