What was your biggest financial mistake?

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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.

@Hortesnewhy? What happened?

Interesting to see how many posts involve a man and his financial abuse.

@LabourOfLoathingI agree on the wedding one. I felt a lot of pressure to do it 'properly' too. If I had my time all over again I would have loved a registry office and pub. So so much money.

Living in London and renting for as long as I did when I should have moved back up north and bought a house. I just worked out I spent £99,000k on rent in the not quite decade I was there.

Sorry! Fingers crossed your Clio is fine for years to come.

FWIW, that bloody Kia passed its MOT and had a full service a few weeks before the gearbox died! It also needed a new steering something or other. Total would have been 5.5k. Not an option. But we were v unlucky according to everyone, it's not common. Sigh. I hate cars.

Why did you crystallise your losses by selling them in 2023?

I was selling a number of investments to buy a house, and crystallising these losses helped offset the capital gains tax on some of the others that had made a profit

Marrying my feckless, low earning ex Husband. Horses. But like a poster above, the second brings me huge joy.... he was just a burden.

Emigrating. Very expensive. Not worth it.

You do understand women financially abuse as well. And when you then ask your mother in law for help , who is very good with numbers as she is a tax inspector and she then turns her back on you and your 9 year old daughter it's a proper kick in the teeth.
But life is what you make it. I'm now divorced and the corrupt tax inspector is no longer my mother in law

Crystallise losses is such a wank expression

Nevertheless, it’s interesting how many posts involve a man and his financial abuse.

Buying a new car every year, for years! The amount of money I lost on them makes me shiver.

Not hanging on until the bitter end when two separate companies I worked for were crashing and burning and slowly making people redundant.

I gaily skipped off to start a new job in both cases (the closedowns were about 10 years apart) whereas my friend who worked with me hung on and got redundancy money for both. (In the first case, the ILEA, I believe this was quite a significant amount.)

Let them kick you out if you can, peeps.

We probably ought to have traded up our house sooner than we did. If we had bought our current house 10 years earlier it would have cost about half what we paid for it two years ago (London prices). We’d probably have paid the mortgage off by now.

Having said that, 10 years ago we were deep in miscarriages and infertility so our thoughts weren’t really on family homes and school catchments. So we might not have bought the house we now have anyway. If we had had kids when we started trying, we would have moved sooner.

Taking 7 years out to be a SAHP was my worst financial decision.

It set me back career-wise, as I never got back to the same level, opting for local/part-time jobs once I had 3 x DCs to run around after. I'm earning less now than I did 26 years ago when I gave up work.

This also (of course) affected my pensions, and my pots are considerably smaller than DH's. Having a lower income and dependent DCs meant there was no spare money for AVCs....I should have remedied that in recent years but just haven't done so.

The career break also meant we delayed trading up the housing market....we did it eventually, but missed out on much of the boom.

Fortunately, DH stayed on the career ladder, kept the family afloat, and has racked up some excellent pensions. Unlike others on this thread, marrying him was one of my better decisions!

But for every bad decision there's a good one, so I shouldn't feel too bad. Signing up for the matched share scheme at work means that DH and I hold about £80k-worth of shares without even noticing we were buying them. We put solar panels on the house just before the big tariffs stopped, which has proved very lucrative. And I've never had an overdraft, or any credit card debt.

So you thought you lost your debit card and never cancelled it? This sounds very naive; don’t fully understand it? And you have an approved overdraft if 7k?

My husband getting a new car in finance every two years until I finally put my foot down.

Me, perhaps working part time for a long time; but I don’t really regret it as there was no way we could both had full demanding jobs and be part of our children lives without family in the UK. No everything is money and I loved spending that time with the kids.

I think no starting on pension earlier has been a big mistake. There were other commitments but I think we could have planned that part better and benefit from
compounding interest.

Taking out an endowment mortgage. It was pushed hard at us and we really thought it through because we’re both so risk averse. It would provide us with a life assurance policy so that if DH died I, as a SAHM would be able to cope, and if I died he would be able to afford childcare. We were told we’d have a nice surplus at the end of our mortgage once we’d paid off the capital and it was going to cost us no more than our ordinary repayment mortgage.

To find out years into the scheme that not only would we not have any surplus but we would have a shortfall was terrifying, and we were too far into our mortgage to switch to repayment which would have cost us more than we had spare. I felt sick every time another red letter arrived telling us how far short we were going to be.

In 1992 I was offered a painting by an unknown, self-taught artist for £2k. Liked it a lot but decided that £2k was a bit too much for someone with no pedigree. Twelve years later it sold for £745k.

What's worse is that it's reproduced everywhere - posters, mugs, coasters etc so I'm constantly reminded of it!

@CrystalSingerFan I work for a big place at the mo' that I'm pretty sure will crash and burn in the next 5 years. I've already been there 10. I'm so bored and thinking I should leave before the entire sector gets laid off and then there's loads of people looking for work at the same time. I can't decide if I should wait for redundancy or leave now.

Talking my DH out of buying £5000 of bitcoin in 2009.

I luckily never did anything really that 'bad' as in it directly cost negatively or put me in a hole.

My biggest mistake was just not getting educated on investing, wealth creation etc early enough in my life, and now longing for what 'could have been' had I done so.

My now ex wife was very clever and controlling. But yes I was in love and naive.
But also you should really be able to trust your other half do you not think.

£7000 was the the overdraft she kept extending with Halifax every month.
I never had any overdrafts or credit cards in my name. She took them out without me knowing.

This financial abuse did result in 3 ccjs for myself. Halifax have also admitted they should not have allowed this to happen. I have it in writing along with bank statements showing the abuse.