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.

Taking a loan out for dh as his credit history crap so I could get a much Lower interest

he paid it for a year then we split , he stopped working and on benefit's (and could get a job but won’t) and muggins here has paid it the last 18mths and have another think 3.5yrs of it

I have to pay it as in my name

I begrudge it every month and have to work more every week /month - I’m self employed - to make sure loan is covered

he doesn’t give a toss that I’m left paying it and will cost me £15k by the time I’ve paid it off

I will never do this again for anyone no matter what

Mine was opting out of my pension in my early 20s, I ended up missing out on two years of contributions.

Lesson learnt though!

Racking up a load of credit card debit when 19/20 most of it on my deadbeat boyfriend at the time

if it wasn’t for my mother giving me an interest free loan I’d still be paying off the interest now 20 years later

In my 20s - pension was not a thing empioyers had to do
( i don't work in corporate )

Then in 2019 - i worked for 8 months for a company
& a rule had just come in that after 3 months In a job - they had to offer pension

I’m afraid you would not have got your pension at 60 by being born in 1959. I was born in 1956 and had to wait until 66.

Ours was buying a used car in a rush. Dealer told us someone in a car on the forecourt was there to buy it and we fell for it. It was a literal death trap and money pit. My dh got locked in when the electrical loom malfunctioned and almost caught fire. Thousands spent of fixing it and we sold it on, now fully working and safe, as we just had bad memories associated with it. At the same time this happened, a company my dh worked as a contractor for went bust owing us thousands. Awful, awful time I'd never want to revisit.

Not cashing in £30k of bonus shares given to me by my previous emolyer as part of annual bonus. I held onto them several years after I left thinking they’ll go up but instead they went out of business 😥

Travel insurance, lack of
Opting out of DB pension (badly advised)
Getting married

Oh my! 😳😳

I don’t know why, but I just knew it was going to be this! As I’m looking at a replica on my wall!

marriage.

Disabled DH post surgery / radiotherapy refusing to apply for the benefit which funds a mobility vehicle, until he was past state retirement age, when it is too late to apply. A very ordinary van adapted to carry his mobility scooter: no change from £60k. Ouch, if he had applied earlier it would have been provided as a benefit.

My mum not buying something by Lowry when she was working as a young journalist in Manchester. She wasn't that impressed....

I purchased a house 3 months before the financial crash of 2008. Negative equity doesn't even begin to describe the result of my stupidity.

I recently bought a diesel car for £17.5k and 2 months later read a headline that diesel will disappear from the forecourt's in the next 4 years. 😂 I’m not too worried but if that does happen my car is going to be the biggest financial mistake I’ve made.

Another was spending £4k on property investment courses just before interest rates went up.

Otherwise, I am usually financially savvy.

This.

Similar issue, £20k for a diesel Skoda estate 12 months ago.

The headline was headline grabbing bollox.

Whatever happens with cars most vans and pretty much all trucks drink diesel. Diesel won't disappear any time soon from main national forecourt brands or supermarkets.

Wow, that's a gorgeous painting. My PIL have a print on their dining room wall.

Ah bugger, such a thing to not have bought.... 😪

I tell myself that there's no way I would have kept it until it was worth so much money. I'm pretty risk averse so if it, say, tripled from £2k to £6k I'd have definitely sold it then.

I think that would be even worse: knowing you owned it and sold out too early.

Getting an endowment mortgage in the 80s …..,luckily we were able to get compensation to get back on track with a repayment mortgage 10 years down the line …..but that was only because our original mortgage provider had lost all our paperwork so the ombudsman went in our favour as a ‘misold’ mortgage….could have ended up thousands and thousands out of pocket

Buying a flat with in 2016 with cladding, lost value, cladding still on plus other issues. Can't even remortgage . I was thinking we will be here max 5 years too. Bye Bye house now....

When I was a graduate, 25 years ago, on a relatively good graduate salary, I didn’t give any consideration to buying a house. I planned to go travelling overseas within a few years so just kind of took the view that I didn’t need a house. I never considered that I could have bought, and then just let it when I went travelling. Then when I returned home years later, house prices in that area had increased massively and I was basically screwed up for life. I sometimes wonder why my parents didn’t ever encourage me to or give me any advice, but it just wasn’t mentioned.

I can absolutely top that one. I went travelling in 1998 saved while I was there and had a 50 grand budget when I returned, And was talked out of buying a 50 grand house by the parents because it wasn’t worth it and the bubble would most definitely burst
I saved a little bit more but by the time I got to the end of that year it was clear that there were bubble was absolutely not going to burst and I had to pay an extra £15,000 for the same house
Cheers, Mum

I knew that would be the first answer. Lol

he destroyed my life and took every penny I had ever earned. Not lol

Not buying AVCs in my 20s when it would have been so cheap for me, went on lots of holidays instead. In in same organisation and v senior now so those cheap extra years would be worth a fortune.