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.

Purely financial, Having children particularly ones with additional needs that can't access childcare limiting my options to work.

Listening to those saying "I could have children young and still have it all" children and a career. Many of those people had a invisable (to me)support network and family behind them.

Living way beyond my means as a student, took every credit card they wanted to throw at me. So much debt! Paid that back now thankfully but still like to live a life of a rich housewife, but unfortunately that will never happen and it’s all under control now. I literally spent ££££££ whilst working just 9 hours a week as a student! Chanel sunglasses, loads of nights out, holidays…

Buying our first house together. It was a difficult time for buyers and houses were snapped up as soon as they went on the market. We bought a doer-upper that cost so much more than we expected. It was really small too when we got our furniture in- it was empty when we viewed it. Nice next door neighbours split up and sold up and a really horrible noisy family bought it and we had no peace. DS was a baby so we cut our losses and put the house part ex on a new one. Not sure how much we lost, but too much! Nowhere near as bad as some posters though.

I have made so many! I am clearly crap with it!

I had £200k worth of shares in a company and didn't sell them when I had the chance. Company then went bust and shares worth nothing.

Moved house and realised quickly it wasn't right so had to move again quickly thereby reducing our equity significantly.

Remortgaged to buy a car. Didn't really think about the impact on our equity.

Moved jobs before I had my last baby knowing I wanted more. New place had no maternity pay.

Have a very expensive hobby!!

@EleanorPeck- it is not in England and I dont know if you have the same “type” - we own the building together, I had downstairs with sort of an added building and he has 2 floors up. Shared garden. I loved it so Much. But because we own the building together he Can break it all and police dont Care. He threw Stones on my roof so I had water coming down in my kitchen. Police did not care. Him screaming at me or my (teenage) children was domestic dispute (!!!) and so on. I have a great and cheap flat now but will be poor forever. I stupidly thought that if you live in such a “shared” house, you would corporate and play nice. Damn I was so wrong and so naive..

Buying a doer upper. It seems like a good idea, to add value etc. But the reality is that every spare penny we have is spent on the house - no holidays or meals out etc. And we spend every day living somewhere cold and unfinished, wondering what we might be able to afford to do next. It costs a fortune to get anything done and there aren’t that many jobs you can really do yourself - you often need a tradesperson.

One of my favorite pictures x

This has been so interesting. I wish I’d read it in my teens. Sadly I’m 40+ and same as a few of you, wish I’d started investing small amounts in my 20’s (I was and am a saver but that’s not as useful), and wish I’d bought a flat far earlier, but buying would not have fit in with my lifestyle then so even with hindsight it’s difficult to see how that would have worked. I think we now need the ‘what was the best thing you did for your financial security’ thread!

😮

Oh. My. Goodness.

Edited as I just realised, I was responding to a post made last year😀

You need to crack open YouTube
There was so much information on there now there’s no excuse to not give it a try yourself. I probably wouldn’t do electric or plumbing but everything else I’d have a go.

Seriously, you'd replace your own roof including the timber frame after watching a YouTube video? Lower the back garden by 30cm and install a damp course? Install supporting beams?

A few financial mistakes:

1. Doing a PhD. It was funded (and quite generous funding) but it took me out of the labour market and I didnt pay into a pension. Academic career didnt happen, so PhD is not necessary to my career

1. Paying for childcare vouchers as part of the workplace salary sacrifice scheme. My husband paid for £3k of vouchers in 2019 which we then didnt use on a childminder due to Covid. My husband changed jobs during Covid so no opportunity to get the money back from the vouchers. Our child is a teen now so childcare not needed.

1. Not doing Rebel Finance School sooner!!!

Not my biggest one but the most recent... just realised I've passed the cut off age for a LISA account. Kept meaning to open one but life got in the way. Didn't realise there was an age limit until recently.

Student loan when I didn’t really need it. Luckily I came to my senses in the third year and don’t take one but I regret the first 2 years. Had some good nights out though 😂

Going to university and racking up student debt and never using my degree.

Not starting to save into a pension until my 30s.

Not starting a pension earlier, not taking out extra pension payments.

The Roof most definitely yes there’s a young couple on Instagram who have quite literally taken the roof off replaced it on themselves. They claimed to have no previous experience obviously I can’t validate that but they’ve done a good job. It doesn’t look complicated.
when I look at my peer group from school, who are tradies None of them were in top set so it really can’t be that difficult

Well, whatever my financial mistakes might have been, at least I didn’t keep accepting money and favours from a convicted sex offender. These are supposed to be the smart people!

Playing it very safe when buying our house, we could have easily bought something bigger but took heed of all the talk about interest rates going up. 14 years later our mortgage rate is still 1.2% (admittedly not for much longer). We could easily have serviced a much higher mortgage during the past decade.

Rebel Finance School is a good starting point

Going to university. I wish that I'd had the courage to stand up to the family pressure and say, "No, it's my life and I'm going to do what I want with it". I bailed out of my degree-related job two years later, with a nervous breakdown.

Also, taking out a loan to buy necessary things for my house, because my overlords (it's owned by my workplace) don't see the house-related things as an issue, because it's not their problem. I love my house, but it's a money pit, and I don't have the funds to buy anywhere else.

I have the same regret, I did a degree in English Literature because "you can get any job with a degree in English!" 😑 Turns out, it doesn't really qualify you to do a great deal, especially for me who didn't have any idea what I wanted to do. I did want to teach but hated uni so much I didn't apply for a PGCE. But not going to uni would have not been an acceptable choice in my family.

My DD is 12 so we have started discussing what options will be available for GCSEs soon and what she might like to do, right now her career ambition is to be an air hostess or an author. She doesn't have any idea of a future career beyond that and I've said to her at 17 if she doesn't know exactly what she wants to do then she doesn't need to go to university until she does know (if she wants to go at all). I'd rather she spent a few years working, figuring out life and finding out what she is passionate about so she can then pursue a degree if she needs to than do something because it's the "done thing" but find out it's not something she can or wants to use.

@QuickNameChange22 Yes, definitely don't encourage her to go before she has found something that she adores and really cares about before going to university!

I feel like we get funnelled out of the education system, where we're effectively spoon-fed, and then at 18, you're pushed off a cliff and told to make your own decisions for the first time in your life... which is definitely NOT a sensible idea! Especially with adults who don't know all about it telling you that you should do X, Y or Z, because that will definitely be useful... when, perhaps, sometimes that is their dream, and not the teenager's!