What was your biggest financial mistake?

[QuickNameChange22]

Was watching an interesting video on YouTube of people talking about their biggest financial mistake and thought I'd be nosy and ask 😁

Mine (aside from having kids 😂) was either:

Taking a credit card out ",for emergencies". It's just amazing what I justified to myself as an emergency when I had that card!

And also taking out a student bank account with a £1.5k overdraft and thinking it was basically free money. Cue the next 4 years of constantly living in my overdraft, my wage not even half clearing it before I spent it to the limit again before the next payday. Sometimes I wish I could go back and give my idiot self a bloody shake.

Losing out on pension while I was a SAHM and working PT with the kids, while DH fattened up his pension.

Reading these, you seem to get a few (like mine!) that were just pure stupidity, but others are just down purely to luck.

We bought our flat back in 2019 with the plan that after 5 years we would hopefully be able to move up the property ladder in to a standard 3 bed semis in our area.

When we bought we probably could have borrowed more and stretched to buy a complete fixer upper of a house but I didn't want to take on a huge mortgage payment. In the 6 years we have been here our flat has increased hugely in value, but those 3 bed semis that we were thinking we could move up to have also increased hugely in value and are just out of reach for us now.

Unless I come into a huge lump sum of money it looks like we're in this flat for the foreseeable whilst everyone around us seems to have these lovely big houses 😶

Getting married, cost of divorce!

Buying a buy to let property on an interest only mortgage ........my God we have paid a heavy price . We are self employed. Bought house in the early 2000's boom times then 2008 bang! We are still paying mortgage and have negative equity of £40,000. No pension as a result 😳

Buying a flat that was leasehold

Sold it 5 years ago
But lost money

Marrying a bastard who saw me as a free nanny/housekeeper/project manager/sex toy/general dogsbody

I didn’t join the Sharesave scheme when I started working for a bank aged 20. I felt I couldn’t afford to save the £20 a month. Colleagues got about £6k back.

Me too

Leaving a secure but awful job (NHS) to do an MBA in the belief that it would open doors to a new career and turbocharge my earning potential. It didn't.

Exactly this…

Getting married.

Horses

First one I have regrets, second is worth it.

Living beyond my means. Over and over again.

Exactly this for me too.

BEING WITH SOMEONE WHO FUCKED HIS FINANCES 🥴🫠🫠

Opening a restaurant just before prices of everything started absolutely sky-rocketing a few years ago, and the COL crisis hit. It is very very hard going.

In my case, believing my union rep's financial adviser when he told me that there was no difference between a flexible working contract and phased retirement when I needed to cut my teaching hours.

There most definitely is: phased retirement gives you more rights. Unfortunately, I took the flexible working contract, meaning that I was unable to reduce my hours further the following year and put in a position where I had to retire before I wanted to, thus reducing my pension.

Similar thing here but just stupid and its because we bought our 1st home. Probably more than 20k too.

Also this.

Buying several BTL flats just before 2008 on interest-only mortgages that are mostly now worth less than we paid for them and we have to subsidise them every month, plus the mortgages haven't gone down. They've never made any money and we can't remortgage them, as they all have either cladding or fire safety issues. I have sleepless nights over them...

When I bought my first flat, I didn't really understand the lease. I had the chance to renew the lease on purchase for 7k, money was v. tight, so I chose not to renew. By the time I sold the flat and had the money to renew, the cost was 50k.
The biggest mistake of my life

Not saving enough to get on the property ladder. At 50, I’m now in a position to buy somewhere but I can now only afford a small terrace house in not so great areas that are worth no more than £120k. It’s a horrible feeling knowing that 20 years ago, perfectly fine terraced houses in the northern city I live in were worth £30k and now they sell for £230k…I could be mortgage free by now 😔

Not going after half of my ex's pension when we divorced. I just wanted rid of him and he made everything so complicated, drawn out and difficult that I just said I'd sign anything to get shot of him.

He is now retired on a very comfortable large pension. I am retiring on a state pension and teeny tiny bits of pension from various part time and bitty jobs taken to keep my and the kids heads above water, because he never paid the CSA he was supposed to.

Not paying into my teacher’s pension for around 9 years. Due to being part time (because of having a disabled child) it’s not great but those 9 years would have made it so much better.

I sold some shares in a dotcom company in the autumn of 1999 for £6k, having made about £1k profit. Over the following months the dotcom boom took off. In the summer of 2000 I could have sold those same shares and would have made an insane amount of profit, I think it was about £300k!

Not a mistake really, but definitely a kick yourself moment!

Being born in 1961 and now having to wait till I am 67 to get my state pension, had I been born before 1959 I would have received my state pension at 60. Second is not putting more money in a pension, instead of companies trying to sell you a pension, it would have been better to have paid someone to help advise me. The third is not knowing I could have paid off my endowment mortgage early, again nobody said we could do this and when I enquired about it, was put off doing so.