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!

Early 2000s I had an idea for a business. It was such a good idea I won a government grant to receive £2000 to pay for business planning support. This happened, I still have the plan. However, I was a single parent of young kids, working full time and I didn’t have any money. I didn’t know how to find the money and then bank wanted me to go 50/50 with them. I had to let it go.

A few years later someone launched this idea and now it’s a multi million pound business that I’m sure most of us use. I think about this every time I use the service 😭

Well then you should maybe know to read the full exchange rather than a knee jerk response @DameCelia

😆 at the poster who says they had the idea that now features in iPhones

You don’t judge whether or not you’ve had an idea before Apple on the basis of the functionality release date @Bobbingtons !

What was it?

I would be 100% outing if I said.

I bought a lottery ticket for the £25 million rollover. The numbers were 5, 6, 19, 23, 24, 32.

When the lottery was drawn, the winning numbers were 12, 13, 21, 31, 43, 47 - in every case all numbers within the same 0-49 range.

I was gutted.

I started buying a bitcoin when it was a few hundred dollars for a bitcoin. I had some error in the middle of the transaction and then forgot about it.

My husband bought Bitcoin as a teenager back in 2010. It cost about 20p per coin back then. Think he bought about £20 worth - so about 100 Bitcoin.

1 Bitcoin is now worth £77,000. So he had £770,000 of Bitcoin on a flash drive that he bought when we were teens.

He lost the flash drive. 🙃

A friend told us to buy Bitcoin when it was £2.50, but we didn’t really understand what it was or have the first clue how to buy it.

I don't understand this one. The numbers seem completely different?

I have posted this before as a warning so it might look familiar.
Our DD got married 20 years ago.
We paid for a big white wedding & helped with their 1st house deposit.
Over the years we helped ( financially) with house upgrades, holidays , childcare & paid for every meal out.
Out of the blue ( now ex ) SIL left DD for OW who he met at work.
DD is now a single parent, living in a much smaller house.
We are still helping DD where we can now out of our pensions.
Ex SIL is buying a 5 bed detached house with OW out of what I consider MY MONEY.
So my advice to any parent about to help children is to get it covered legally.
We were stupid not to but thought he was a decent guy.
My user name says it all.

OMG, so close

I bought my 1st flat for £35K then sold it a few years later for £55K.
The whole area got gentrified and it went up and up in value, I saw it up for sale for £125K round 5 years after I sold it and wished I had kept it
THEN the nearby river flooded and the flat (ground floor) ended up mostly underwater and became almost uninsurable and unsellable

I bought a little house for £28k back at the end of the 80's when I was 19. I rented it out when I moved in with XH. Foolishly, four years later, I let XH persuade me to sell it so we could make improvements to his house.

We've been for years now, and last year I discovered the house had just sold for £230k. I SO wish I'd held onto it and had a nest egg for when I had to start all over again!

Everyone who has ever sold a house could say the same thing.

"Substances" and festivals did so much to help me understand life and live it more fully (in my 40s) that I don't think your original "investment plans" were misplaced. As evidenced by your admirable philosophy of life.

The older I get, the more I think that "getting high" is a natural instinct that we overlook at our peril. Done the right way, it puts things properly into perspective.

After a job interview (unsuccessful - given the feedback conversation I suspect they knew who they would be hiring), I was asked if I would like feedback and told I was young and very smart and would never get as rich as I could staying in journalism. That I should get an MBA under my belt and go into corporate life.

I suspect it wouldn’t have suited me. But that is definitely one of my main sliding doors moments. I discussed it with my parents expecting them to have the horrors about yet more studying (degree plus journalism postgrad) and to my surprise they were all in favour of it. But I loved my job so stayed put.

I didn't have one but DH did. he had two. He was offered jobs at a law firm and as a creative at an ad agency but his heart wasn't in either of them. He went on to do a creative job he adored for half the pay, which then stalled when he was made redundant in his early fifties. He could have been rich, but he would have hated his working life.

DC have inherited this attitude from both of us. They are in careers that don't earn as much as their brains could get them elsewhere. But they love their jobs and have the attitude that it is too many hours of life to devote to something you hate just to be able to afford a bigger house you never spend much time in because you are at work or commuting.

I could have bought a 3 bed house for 90k in the 90s but travelled instead. That house is worth a few hundred grand now and I didn't get another opportunity to get on the housing ladder until 2012 so now I have a huge mortgage when I could have been mortgage free like my ex 🤷‍♀️

Why didn’t you accept the bank’s offer?? You went with zero rather than 50/50 😵‍💫 @imnothavingagoodtime

Huh? Your daughter’s divorce lawyer must have been utter shite @Afoolandtheirmoney

Because I was a young single Mum with absolutely no savings and had a shared ownership house which I couldn’t use as collateral. Where would I have got the 50% from?

@5gums shame I missed your reply before it was deleted! What did you have to say??

My biggest financial mistakes:

1. Not having a budget for years of my working life
2. Telling myself I could not afford to save. Which meant I did not save for years.
3. Not starting investing as an 18 year old
4. Getting into credit card debt due to 1 and 2 above.
5. Being single most of my life!