To ask what's your stupidity tax?

[autienotnaughty]

Stupidity tax - something you have done that's ended up costing you financially or emotionally.

I'll go first.

I'm in the house one Friday night with dh and the kids. Eldest has a friend over who I offer to drive home. Can't find the car keys anywhere. I nip out to the car (I have form for leaving the car unlocked) discover that not only is the car unlocked but the keys are in the ignition switch on (as in lights and radio should be on but engine is not running). Probably been like that around five hours so the battery is completely dead.
Dh cannot revive the dead battery so end up paying ££ To increase our emergency cover to include home start and £££ for a new battery.
All in all a pretty expensive mistake. This sort of thing happen to anyone else?

Paying for a years swimming and hardly going

I've paid for the gym but that's 2 minutes away and not a 20 minute bus ride

I’m definitely a higher rate stupidity tax payer…

Recently had a very satisfying day decluttering the house with multiple trips to the tip. I hadn’t looked at my phone all day and couldn’t find it in the evening so asked my DH to do a ‘locate my’ on his phone - phone was in a massive, stinking skip at the tip with no way of getting it out. My previous phone had been put in the washing machine.

OP yes also been there with the car and dead battery. We camped in a beautiful remote spot in Scotland and had the car doors open to give some light. Next day flat battery and no reception.

My choice in men .

Also car related- hired one for a work trip (I run a tiny biz so me paying for it). Treated myself to a lovely electric car as I'd never driven one before. Applied for a new driving license as my current one was about to expire, printed off all my paperwork for flight/car and put it in my travel car because I like to be organized. Car had been prepaid £200.

Get to car hire place and pull out my paperwork and license. I'd left the new one in my desk draw and only had the expired license 🤪

This is the day I learned you can hire a car with an expired license but it'll cost you!! Extra £350 for a new car... fuming at my own stupidity.

£550 in total, could have hired a bloody Bentley with that. Had a v pleasant trip though.

You've reminded me I've lost the new license again, must go through my desk and look for it

DH somehow managed to chuck our 'main car' spare car key in the tip last year! No idea why he had the key or how it ended up there... he was driving our older car which we use for tip runs. Bought air tags for our keys after this incident

Private education. Should have burnt the money and at least reduce the heating bill.

i put the wrong fuel in the car, £300 later and I was told that apparently I was lucky not to have completely ruined the engine but not sure I felt that lucky at the time

Small scale, not noticing the bit about needing to display a parking pass in the Airbnb host's instructions and not noticing the parking pass in the folder inside the flat until the car had three parking tickets shoved under the windscreen wipers.

Big picture, school fees. Seemed like the right thing to do at the time and it took me too long to see that it wasn't ideal for my older children.

Buying a house next door to the world’s worst neighbours…

I'm liking this thread. Not sure it's quite the same but now that I've discovered Vinted for buying kids clothes, I can safely say I've wasted hundreds, thousands maybe on clothes and kid stuff (especially baby) that I could have just bought second hand. I was swept along on the wave of shiny new things for far too long...

Misfuelling the car x2
Not paying tax on time and getting nailed for a couple of hundred quid (didn't understand the system at the time, was menopausal and had too much going on)
Breaking two rather nice glasses I had just bought against a concrete pillar in the car park

There are others. I am a fucking idiot at times.

On a recent holiday I mixed up the train tickets and we got on an earlier train by accident. My original tickets were non transferable so ended up paying the enormous on the day price (£220) for new tickets. It was pretty gutting!

Marriage.

We were upgrading our sofa, DH worked with a guy, just starting out so offered him our old one FOC. Young guy very appreciative and said yes. Young guy lived 40 miles from us, had no transport. We borrowed a friends van, paid for petrol, drove and delivered the sofa. We then bought the van owner a bottle of nice wine for allowing us to borrow said van. Young guy, didn’t lift a finger or pay a penny towards anything and wasn’t remotely inconvenienced. Just sat happily on his freshly cleaned sofa. 🙈🙈🤣

Coming home from Maldives we had a separate flight booked from Dubai as we thought we would stop off for a few days. When we went to check in, we were told it was the day before and we had missed it! (In the days before internet check in) I had got confused with the overnight dates as it was a night flight. Very expensive to get back to UK! I am super careful now!!

I did this (though not as dramatic). Booked a taxi home from a night flight the day before I actually landed. Cue one v confused taxi driver at the airport when I was in Miami. Had to pay him twice £80 (obviously), plus he was my neighbor 😂

The more posts on this thread the more I'm realising how much stupidity tax I've paid!!

Booked flights to the wrong airport so had to hire a car a week before we needed it and do the 4 hour drive there and back.

Didn’t know you needed a visa for visiting Australia (thought it was only work visas because that’s all I’d heard anyone discussing) until trying to check in and couldn’t get one sorted in time so missed the flight. And then didn’t think to reuse the return flight so bought completely new tickets…premium economy 😤

Signing up to Fabletics

Buying stuff on Vinted that is badly fitting, or more worn out than I could really tell from the pics. I wouldn't have bought any of it if I had seen it first-hand.

Repeatedly buying glasses that don't suit me. It's such a high-value exercise that I do so rarely, that each mistake is a very expensive one.

Constantly buying too much fruit and veg at the weekly shop and always throwing half of it out. I never learn. I can never get it right despite meal planning efforts. I blame the family of teens constantly making last minute changes to their plans!

Could you not have gotten off at the next stop and used the old tickets n paid the fare for the wrong train up to then?

Not ordering the bag of dog food online in time because I forgot about the bank holiday Monday. She wouldn’t have had enough so I had to buy an extra bag from the local shop which is more pricey per kg (online I get a 12kg bag delivered, but the shop only stocks 2kg bags).

the bit that makes it more annoying is that it’s not even the first time I’ve done it!

Putting the wrong car reg into parking app, so not only paying for parking (albeit for friend's car that was not there) but also having to pay the £25 fine for not having paid for parking for the car actually in the car park. It's a relatively small amount but insanely frustrating stupidity tax!

i live in fear of filling my car with the wrong fuel, I often drive several different vehicles a week for work and have to refuel them all so I’m really strict about always reading the label in the fuel cap and matching it to the fuel nozzle every time I refuel any car, even my own!

last year I lost my keys while I was out but luckily had my spare key in my car and had left it unlocked also luckily no one had stolen my car 🤦‍♀️ I then lost my spare key THE SAME DAY. Fortunately my car was at home when I lost the spare key somewhere in my village. I was self employed at the time and couldn’t work for 3 days until someone found my original keys in a puddle in the woods and handed them into the police station where I collected them. Trying to explain to all my customers why I couldn’t come to work for 3 days was embarrassing and if cost me a fortune in missed work!

I would 'spill' but I appear to have put them all in the ' move on' folder🤣🤣

some advantages to menopause brain fog I suppose.

I had to start charging our Fleet drivers for incorrect fuel refilling. It was costing us a fortune & I hope it would focus their attention!! The vehicles had stickers on the fuel doors/flaps and the fuel caps, all vehicles took the same fuel. They got the first accident/mistake free, but had to pay after that. It helped, but didn't entirely stop it.