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 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
Ouch, that hurts. Well, we can only change the present and future, so that’s what we should focus on.
Omg. I hate you for making me check BTC
I once owned 0.35 BTC, sold it for about $800
Now it’s worth about $35k
Fuck me
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.
They changed it a few years back to default to the Lifecycle fund which matches your retirement date.
This is so much better. Glad they did that.
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.
Droppping out of college after 5 years. Instantly got me 30k debt.
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
I didn’t have a prenup drawn up. Bye house.
Not buying $100 bitcoin when it was $0.00001
Thats just the gen-z version of not investing in apple in the 90s. Missed opportunities are not the same as actual mistakes, they all involve risk and things that blow up like BTC are rare and hard to see before they are take off. Its best to not kick your self over not having a time machine.
Then it would probably be getting credit cards.
Kids, don’t get credit cards, sure there are some benefits but unless you are anal about your finances 24/7, you are going to mess up at some point. Instead, just save your money if possible and pay cash for everything. I know housing is super expensive and one can’t just save money for a roof so there are some exemptions, but don’t let the exceptions become the norm. Also, fuck those loans to buy daily stuff in multiple payments, there should never be a reason for you to need that (hopefully I’m not super disconnected from current financial reality)
Credit cards are fine if your responsible with them. Don’t run balances (unless you have to), use them as a buffer for your checking account, not a loan. Try and find one associated with your main bank, set a low balance limit (less than your savings, and try to get your savings over that limit), has decent rewards and has low fees. They are not in the business of screwing their existing customers, unlike a retail card, which has less of an incentive to behave.
The key adventage if you good at being a boring banking customer is dispute resolution. In the case of debit cards, you have to go after your own money. With credit cards, the bank has to go after its money, and they can put more effort into it than you can. (Plus enough credit card disputes will cause the card processor to drop the vendor, so… You have that card to play).
And your 100% correct on the micro-loan nonsense, thats not finance or credit, they are a scam.
My finger was hovering over buying about 250$ worth of bitcoins at around 0.20USD a pop. Back then I was pretty broke. I had been unemployed for a bit was burning through savings and struggling to pay rent, so it was hard to justify.
Same here, my paycheck barely covered my expenses and putting down $100 on some “crypto funny money” seemed like throwing money away
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.
I sold all my Nvidia stick right before the AI boom.
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.
Do NOT do business with family.
Bought a house through my sister. She was supposed to give us $19K @ closing. We got $3K.
Fucking cunt!
Once fell for a high yield bitcoin scam.
I worked too long for a job that paid way below average. Thinking I didn’t deserve any better.
I was 17 and went to a fancy private art collage in a high COL city, all on student loans. This was 2003-2006. I’m still $40k in debt, and I burnt out and didn’t finish.
I did go back to school for something else, for free, so I ended up okay in terms of a degree, but all these years later and I have only half my student loans paid off. That’s crazy.
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