Hey all, Robert here. I’m a writer for The Penny Hoarder and wanted to stop in and say hello!
We recently created a fun topic about “money fails” – something you might have done in the past with money that maybe you regret it or see it another way now. It doesn’t have to be super serious. It’s okay to make fun of yourself a little, too!
I’ll start.
Many of us probably don’t make the best money decisions in our early 20s, and I was no different. After I graduated college, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer so I studied, took the LSAT, and got into a law school. After about 2 weeks at said law school, I knew this wasn’t for me. I hated it. But I didn’t know what to do. I was locked in for the year with student loan financing, and didn’t really want to embarrass myself by quitting so early in the semester.
I finally decided to just get out before I had to pay for the whole semester, which I think ran somewhere between 8-10K. That said, even though I withdrew from the school, I still had to pay a good portion of those student loans back.
All said, I think I ended up paying back around 3k for 3 weeks of school. That stung.
The lesson? Don’t lock into those loans until you know for sure that’s where you want to be!
I think my biggest money fail was just being careless when I had it when I was young. I was in a fairly lucrative career so I bought the clothes, the car, the entertainment, the gifts. Now I regret most of the things I bought that were so materialistic.
i have to say the biggest mistake i keep making is loaning my grown children money to pay their bills, i have decided starting now, i will tell them i am broke i seem to be weak when it comes to my children
A big money fail for me was paying way too much in taxes on a business I launched years ago. Basically, I messed up by playing around with numbers in TurboTax and it cost me a couple thousand dollars that I calculated I “owed” in taxes. I couldn’t figure out how to edit my return to get back to square one. Or maybe I was too impatient to just start the entire return over. Ouch. Being young and with a little inheritance money at the time, I kind of brushed it off as not a big deal. I’d love to get that money back these days.
I had a few! I would have done my education differently- I love my career, but would have picked less expensive schools.
My parents didn’t do much in the way of teaching how to ‘do’ finances - they didn’t know themselves. So once I got out and to college and beyond, I didn’t manage my money well. Credit cards to finally ‘afford’ some of the things I always wanted!
It wasn’t until about 8 years ago that I started to buckle down and work on things. Better late than never.
