Ever want to go back and teach yourself a couple financial lessons?
You can't go back, but you can try to let a few other people learn from your mistakes.
Here are some of mine from biggest to smallest financial impact (I think)
Mistake #1 - I started investing in the early 2000's. I heard and knew that investing too much in your company stock was a bad idea, but I did it anyways. They even encouraged it by doing our 401K matches in company stock! Even worse that being just another loser story, I did make a good chuck of money when the price spiked. I sold it for about $40K, and no kidding, started reinvesting it and chased it all the way back down to $0.05 per share. D'oh!
I should have used $20K to pay down my mortgage (doing the math I think I would be mortgage free now instead of 4 years form now...), put $3000 into my Roth (I think it was still $3K max then), paid off my first truck, put $8K into SPY, and at most put $2K back into the company and let a small % of the profits "ride". Not having that money now hurts. Not that I'm doing bad, but I'd be far better off. Add a new pool and deck to the house would have been chump change and now it's not even a financially responsible possibility.
Mistake #2 - Buying a brand new 2000 F-150. Not so bad when you are young and dumb (I'm still dumb BTW), they're fun, but then 5 years later I traded it in for another new 2005 F-150. The first one would have been fine, the second one was stupid. If I could do it over I'd have kept the first truck the full 8 years, still have been under 100,000 miles, and probably more happy than with my current truck that I view as a mistake.
Mistake #3 - Not paying extra principle on my mortgage from the start. Sure, it would tough then and I'm making more money now, but I was paying $100/month in principle when I first started. A night or two at home instead of going to the bar and adding an extra $100 in principle to my payments would not have killed me. I'm paying more on my payments now because I didn't pay less into them then.
Mistake #4 - Don't work for free. I have a second job for a while that paid nothing. Promises and promises and making riches when the place started making money. Yeah, it went bankrupt a little under two years from when they first came up with the plans. Don't waste your time working with shady salesman.
Mistake #5 - Bars. Drink Miller High Life Lite's at home, it's much cheaper.
-Raymond
You can't go back, but you can try to let a few other people learn from your mistakes.
Here are some of mine from biggest to smallest financial impact (I think)
Mistake #1 - I started investing in the early 2000's. I heard and knew that investing too much in your company stock was a bad idea, but I did it anyways. They even encouraged it by doing our 401K matches in company stock! Even worse that being just another loser story, I did make a good chuck of money when the price spiked. I sold it for about $40K, and no kidding, started reinvesting it and chased it all the way back down to $0.05 per share. D'oh!
I should have used $20K to pay down my mortgage (doing the math I think I would be mortgage free now instead of 4 years form now...), put $3000 into my Roth (I think it was still $3K max then), paid off my first truck, put $8K into SPY, and at most put $2K back into the company and let a small % of the profits "ride". Not having that money now hurts. Not that I'm doing bad, but I'd be far better off. Add a new pool and deck to the house would have been chump change and now it's not even a financially responsible possibility. Mistake #2 - Buying a brand new 2000 F-150. Not so bad when you are young and dumb (I'm still dumb BTW), they're fun, but then 5 years later I traded it in for another new 2005 F-150. The first one would have been fine, the second one was stupid. If I could do it over I'd have kept the first truck the full 8 years, still have been under 100,000 miles, and probably more happy than with my current truck that I view as a mistake.
Mistake #3 - Not paying extra principle on my mortgage from the start. Sure, it would tough then and I'm making more money now, but I was paying $100/month in principle when I first started. A night or two at home instead of going to the bar and adding an extra $100 in principle to my payments would not have killed me. I'm paying more on my payments now because I didn't pay less into them then.
Mistake #4 - Don't work for free. I have a second job for a while that paid nothing. Promises and promises and making riches when the place started making money. Yeah, it went bankrupt a little under two years from when they first came up with the plans. Don't waste your time working with shady salesman.
Mistake #5 - Bars. Drink Miller High Life Lite's at home, it's much cheaper.
-Raymond
. But I was broke, and I've always been cheap, so I would buy some beer, drink it in the parking lot, then go in and nurse a single all night long. If I got too sober I could always head back out to the parking lot to finish the 6er. Not recommending this course of action, and I doubt it would work in this era of heightened awareness of drunk in public. But it worked for me back in the day.
