I could have been rich! Biggest financial mistakes

[rememberitalltoowell]

And how you come to terms with them?

I turned down a really well paid role for something else that didn't turn out as planned, and could only find much lower paying roles afterwards. When I work out what that decision cost me over the course of my career, we're talking hundreds of thousands!

I identified a gap in the market for a product that was already very well established. Marketed this idea to my AM and was complwtely shot down, ridiculed and actually laughed at.
1yr later my idea was realised and performed very well. Wish I had kept all the research and project work.

Growth of what? Property values have increased beyond inflation, yes.

As per below

Similar story with the Shadwell development for me. Around the same time, I took a fancy to a derelict house in Charlotte Street that had been unsold for a while. XH couldn't face the amount of work it needed.

My most classic head-desk story is from when Bitcoin was really new. Wanting to see how it worked, I bought 1 BTC for a tenner from a guy on a forum. There were no crypto wallets then, so what I received was a long block of code and a link to install Tor. Despite the seller trying quite patiently to explain, he may as well have been speaking Martian. I can't even remember what computer I was using back then, and 'my' coin must've long since disappeared into some Korean's server shed. They're hovering around £80k at the moment.

Life is life [shrug]. We're defined by what we do, not what we don't do.

According to mumsnetters, everyone who can't progress is lazy and not intelligent enough.

Not getting round to paying a bit extra into my pension when I went part time for 15 years. Really kicking myself now. We could have afforded it but were busy with dc and just never got round to doing anything about it until a few years ago. Missed out on loads of growth and colleagues who stayed full time are retiring early now.

I'm still pissed off at DH. He spent all his free time a few years ago when the kids were little (I'm talking hours and hours at weekends, bank holidays, evenings, even on his annual leave) doing unpaid extra work to design a database type system for something very niche for work. He wasn't asked to do it but the product they were using was outdated and not fit for purpose. He got obsessed with making it fantastic. It was probably a couple of years of his life just spent on that, while I was taking on the load at home (and working myself). I told him if it was that fantastic he needed to copyright it somehow and he could potentially make some money back (which I felt would be fair enough considering all his own time he'd used to produce it).

He said that as it was a public sector thing he was doing it for the public good yadda yadda. What happened? It started to be used throughout the organisation then it was taken on by a company that came in and asked to develop it. That company ended up polishing it up and now other public bodies are using it as standard. No doubt that company has made a large wodge of money out of it all.

I should not have bothered with uni, worked full time in my weekend job & got one of those 95% interest only mortgages. I would be laughing now!

I turned down a cash buyer offering the full asking price to sell a house at a lower price to a "nice couple" because I wanted it to remain a family home. The family pulled out, the original cash buyer had bought elsewhere, and the eventual purchaser messed us around and dropped their offer the day before exchange of contracts. Cost us over thirty thousand pounds. Twenty years ago. Still kicking myself.

Not buying a central London flat with DH.
Had an opportunity at a very good price in early 00s. Think it was around £200k for a 2 bed. Umm'd and ahhh'd but decided we hadn't been together long enough to commit to buying a property.

Getting married.

I really should have hired a solicitor to negotiate my child/spousal support when I divorced my ex. Addressing pension sharing now and seeing his income compared with mine as a sahm has been quite shocking. I’ve applied for him to cover my legal costs this time … level the playing field as it were.

Always pros and cons...... shoulda woulda coulda. Hindsight is 20/20.
I was offered a starter position of a great career in 2007 but I didnt feel confident so turned it down and took a more established position elsewhere where I felt more confident - but the caps on progression salaries were lower. I climbed the ladder but reached the cap. I ended up going back to the other organisation later anyway - going in at an established higher level and then climbing up to that cap. I should have done a bit more research initially. I often wonder if I would have gone up higher quicker had I taken the original job rather than going in later. But I dont know - its swings and roundabouts. Now I am doing some training and a qualification that may or may not boost my career and position / but I think if I would have done this sooner had I worked here earlier. But I honestly dont spend very much time thinking on it - I just crack on with what I have got.

It's not worth regretting the past like this.
Around 20 years ago I came up with a novel use of technology to make music using new to the market tech. Considered parenting it but never got round to it. This was before the rise of smartphones. If I had patented it I would now probably now be being paid by every smartphone manufacturer because the same functionality is on every single phone sold in the world. Honestly I'm just not the entrepreneurial type and I've got a pretty good life still!

I could have bought a studio in the Barbican or a zone 2 one bed - obvs went for the one bed that turned out to have all sorts of problems and sold it for 30k less 3 years later.

Also should have put a significant inheritance in stocks 15 years ago instead of various cash accounts. Am now moving most of it into stocks to bolster my p!$$poor post divorce pension pot.

I rented in an area that went on to become heavily gentrified. The building was sold and they offered priority buy to current tenants, 80k at the time. I was barely out of uni and 80k seemed like insane money, it never occurred to me to reach out to an older relative or anything.

My flat now would have been worth over 1M. I try to not think about it because it’s pointless, but what really kills me is that it was completely gutted, turned into a shitty IKEA lookalike Airbnb.

🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲

What functionality are you talking about?

This thread shows that the best time to get on the property ladder is always now (or as early as possible) and the best time to start investing is always now (or as early as possible).

My regret is not starting a pension until I was 32. I could easily have double what I have now for no noticeable reduction in quality of life if I'd started at 21.

This thread shows that the best time to get on the property ladder is always now (or as early as possible) and the best time to start investing is always now (or as early as possible).

Not sure about that, plenty of new build flats bought post Brexit that have lost value.

I lost 250 bitcoins in an old computer that got lost in a move a few years ago lost passwords and keys words etc . I bought them as a joke for pennies 😭

An ex boyfriend of mine was a multi millionaire. A genuinely lovely man. He asked me to marry him but unfortunately I just didn’t love him like that (we were also incompatible in bed) and we split up.

he married his next girlfriend and they divorced 5 years later and she’s now also a multimillionaire.

i could feel jealous but then i wouldn’t have had almost 15 years with my husband who is very poor but makes my heart sing.

money isn’t everything.

I regret selling my roadworthy air cooled 911 when it was just an old car, for.......£1800 !

I wanted to invest in property when in my 20's - early 2000's. Proper strategy investing with multiple properties- I did all the study, research etc. knew what I was doing.

DH suddenly refused. Thought property was a bad idea. Too hard. Too much risk. I suspect his DM was in his ear. Well, property has gone up three fold here since then. It was incredibly cheap & we had the resources. I still get pissed off, because I've learned DH is crap with money & lost a chunk investing. I don't dwell on it. I learned to take over our finances fully & have paid off our current home & have a good pension pot, so we'll be ok. But in late 40's now & could have been retired.

Irony is DH hates working even more than ime!!

Marrying for love 😂

He's good fun and easy on the eye though, so I console myself with that.

I was obsessed with the concept of theramins at the time and envisioned using touchscreens and pitch shifting to create a keyboard where you could slide from one note to the other as a continuing rising or lowering note. Bearing in mind this was a couple of years before apple even patented the multi touch capacitive touchscreen so the tech wasn't even available at the time and my patent searches couldn't find anything similar there is a good chance I would have had it granted. It was a little more complex than that but that was the gist.