People who made a single terrible financial decision that still haunts you to this day - how did it happen?
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I got together with the wrong person. That woman cost me $15k in 3 months, burned through all of my savings for her amusement and made me take a $6k loan for furniture and a flat.
Lemmings, what’s your sad story?Your mistake wasn't the woman.
It was your inability to say no and set boundaries, especially when it involved money.
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I got together with the wrong person. That woman cost me $15k in 3 months, burned through all of my savings for her amusement and made me take a $6k loan for furniture and a flat.
Lemmings, what’s your sad story?I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.
I didn't know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.
I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of "picking yourself up by your bootstraps," so I usually trusted him for financial advice.
He told me that he'd never heard of this "TSP thing" and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other "more legitimate" options for investing my money.
So I didn't enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.
For all my dad's knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn't have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like "set up a Roth IRA" (whatever that was) and "pay attention to what's happening on Wall Street." I really shouldn't have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.
Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.
Today, I'm 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it's nowhere near $1 million.
All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could've had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I'm surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.
I'm not hurting financially, but I'm also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I'm probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don't really have money to throw around.
I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to "class-jump" like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.
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I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.
I didn't know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.
I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of "picking yourself up by your bootstraps," so I usually trusted him for financial advice.
He told me that he'd never heard of this "TSP thing" and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other "more legitimate" options for investing my money.
So I didn't enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.
For all my dad's knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn't have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like "set up a Roth IRA" (whatever that was) and "pay attention to what's happening on Wall Street." I really shouldn't have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.
Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.
Today, I'm 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it's nowhere near $1 million.
All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could've had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I'm surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.
I'm not hurting financially, but I'm also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I'm probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don't really have money to throw around.
I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to "class-jump" like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.
Tbf, the tsp by default I believe throws your money in a G fund which is basically bonds iirc. So you'd be better off but if you never actually managed it it would've netted you far less than you think.
Still, better than not being in it. Good on you for helping others avoid the pitfalls you experienced.
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I was mining bitcoin in the very early days (when bitcoins were worth pennies). No idea how much it was and is worth now, but I am pretty sure I'd never have to work again if I still had access to these bitcoins.
I was down on my luck and had to sell a dozen bitcoin for like $80 a pop so I feel you lol
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I was down on my luck and had to sell a dozen bitcoin for like $80 a pop so I feel you lol
Ouch, that hurts. Well, we can only change the present and future, so that's what we should focus on.
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Tbf, the tsp by default I believe throws your money in a G fund which is basically bonds iirc. So you'd be better off but if you never actually managed it it would've netted you far less than you think.
Still, better than not being in it. Good on you for helping others avoid the pitfalls you experienced.
They changed it a few years back to default to the Lifecycle fund which matches your retirement date.
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I got together with the wrong person. That woman cost me $15k in 3 months, burned through all of my savings for her amusement and made me take a $6k loan for furniture and a flat.
Lemmings, what’s your sad story?I was the tech director of a small video game start-up. Our investment dried up but I didn’t want to lay off our employees so I kept the company going, burning through my savings, and not taking a salary myself, while hoping the finance director could sort out new investment.
He couldn’t. We had to wind the company up anyway and I had nothing left. That lead to some hard times.
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I was mining bitcoin in the very early days (when bitcoins were worth pennies). No idea how much it was and is worth now, but I am pretty sure I'd never have to work again if I still had access to these bitcoins.
My story is when you could first buy them when they were worth pennies and a friend wanted to invest with me in them. Only wanted us to each put in $100 at first. Just didn't believe they'd catch on.
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I got together with the wrong person. That woman cost me $15k in 3 months, burned through all of my savings for her amusement and made me take a $6k loan for furniture and a flat.
Lemmings, what’s your sad story?wrote last edited by [email protected]I trusted a family member.
They promised to let me rent the house I had grown up in until I have the money to buy it. At the beginning, I was still a university student with a part-time job so this quickly ate up my savings but I figured it was worth it. Then, about a year after I had finally finished university and had started working full time, they suddenly decided to set an ultimatum of about six months for me to buy the house or leave, even threatening to hire a gardener at my cost to make the property more attractive to buyers.
I pleaded, fought, tried to get a loan but of course without any savings as security, nobody would give me one. I had to move into an apartment, that's smaller, older and more expensive than the house that had been my home for 23 years. While I'm not in debt, I still struggle to build up enough savings to get a loan for a home, even after eight years on a software engineer's salary.
I've completely cut ties with that side of the family and I still occasionally have nightmares about the whole situation.
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I sold all my Nvidia stick right before the AI boom.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Haha, I bought 200 shares at $10.12 and sold at $12 along with a bit of other stocks I had because I needed a down payment for my house. After splits since, last time I decided to depress myself looking at one of those calculators it would be like 800k.
I've learned playing (free) poker though, you'll eat yourself alive if you focus on the woulda/could/shoulda and end up making more mistakes. In poker (and investing) you do the best you can with incomplete information and sometimes it sucks. Move on.
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I trusted a family member.
They promised to let me rent the house I had grown up in until I have the money to buy it. At the beginning, I was still a university student with a part-time job so this quickly ate up my savings but I figured it was worth it. Then, about a year after I had finally finished university and had started working full time, they suddenly decided to set an ultimatum of about six months for me to buy the house or leave, even threatening to hire a gardener at my cost to make the property more attractive to buyers.
I pleaded, fought, tried to get a loan but of course without any savings as security, nobody would give me one. I had to move into an apartment, that's smaller, older and more expensive than the house that had been my home for 23 years. While I'm not in debt, I still struggle to build up enough savings to get a loan for a home, even after eight years on a software engineer's salary.
I've completely cut ties with that side of the family and I still occasionally have nightmares about the whole situation.
I’ve completely cut ties
Fucking hell I was gonna say, you call that family??
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I got together with the wrong person. That woman cost me $15k in 3 months, burned through all of my savings for her amusement and made me take a $6k loan for furniture and a flat.
Lemmings, what’s your sad story?I had two: I fell for a predatory gym membership for 24/7 Hour Fitness that charged my card even though I couldn't enter the damn place without paying for an access card because "it expired". The fuCK? And years later, fell for another one because the credit card was imposed on me by an Amazon subcontractor during training. They made it seem mandatory for logistical reasons, and I was oblivious. They made it as hard as possible to cancel the damn thing so a lot of people fucked over their credit.
I've learned a lot since.
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I’ve completely cut ties
Fucking hell I was gonna say, you call that family??
Barely.
We can't choose who we're related to but we can absolutely choose not to talk to them ever again.
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It's best not to lose your mind over it, like the guy who has been searching for his lost disk in a dump for 10+ years. Here have a funny gif to cheer you up:
I also had a Bitcoin wallet on an old laptop I used of my fathers that he eventually sent to the dump that I very much considered trying to get back for a while. But I decided down that road lay madness. It still makes me sick to think about. Not as much as it used to. I’ve come around to literally throwing multiple lifetimes worth of money away.
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My story is when you could first buy them when they were worth pennies and a friend wanted to invest with me in them. Only wanted us to each put in $100 at first. Just didn't believe they'd catch on.
I mean, you weren't really wrong about them catching on. Usage by everyday people is vanishingly rare and it's certainly not trending in a positive direction. They're just... worth a lot now... for some reason.
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Tbf, the tsp by default I believe throws your money in a G fund which is basically bonds iirc. So you'd be better off but if you never actually managed it it would've netted you far less than you think.
Still, better than not being in it. Good on you for helping others avoid the pitfalls you experienced.
As the other commenter said, it now puts you in the closest life cycle fund to your 67th birthday. They also automatically start you contributing 5%, which would get you the 5% match. Basically immediately doubling your investment.
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I got together with the wrong person. That woman cost me $15k in 3 months, burned through all of my savings for her amusement and made me take a $6k loan for furniture and a flat.
Lemmings, what’s your sad story?wrote last edited by [email protected]Probably not exactly what you meant, but not going to college with my group of friends that did. They went for computer science because they were interested in it and are now doing very well for themselves. I was never that interested in it and am more "hands on" with physical stuff so I didn't feel like I should "waste" the money on that degree and figured I would spend time trying to figure out what I could do.
I never "found myself" and am currently living in someone's garage making not much money working in a factory that's going to be over 90°F today with 75+% humidity... So in my case the financial mistake was not taking out a loan.
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Oof.
And wait a minute, I just saw you in the Europe community. Hi.
And wait a minute, I just saw you in the Europe community. Hi.
This is like when you see a neighbor in the frozen aisle and wave politely but then ten minutes later you see them again in the bakery and you’re like, not sure how to react because it’s weird to wave again but even weirder to pretend like you didn’t see them so you end up saying something stupid like “we gotta stop meeting like this” and then your own inherent cringe bounces around inside your head for hours
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I got together with the wrong person. That woman cost me $15k in 3 months, burned through all of my savings for her amusement and made me take a $6k loan for furniture and a flat.
Lemmings, what’s your sad story?Not buying $100 bitcoin when it was $0.00001
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Probably not exactly what you meant, but not going to college with my group of friends that did. They went for computer science because they were interested in it and are now doing very well for themselves. I was never that interested in it and am more "hands on" with physical stuff so I didn't feel like I should "waste" the money on that degree and figured I would spend time trying to figure out what I could do.
I never "found myself" and am currently living in someone's garage making not much money working in a factory that's going to be over 90°F today with 75+% humidity... So in my case the financial mistake was not taking out a loan.
If you weren't interested in computer science, going to college for it probably would have been a mistake. It sounds like your mistake was not finding your career niche early enough.
