Post by UnderProtest on Jan 16, 2015 11:00:27 GMT -5
What was your biggest MM mistake? Would you do it again because of what you learned or where it lead you? If not, what would you have done instead and how would it affect your life?
Post by crashgizmo on Jan 16, 2015 11:07:42 GMT -5
It would have to be buying my first house with my ex-H. This was in Arizona on 2006 when they were giving out mortgages like candy. We bought a $250K house on less than $50K/year salary. Then my ex left and I was stuck with the house, then the market crashed. I short sold it in 2009 for $90K. I know I am so fortunate that my credit was minimally effected and I was able to recover in a few years. It's made me very anxious and wary of home ownership. I would not do it again.
Going to grad school and taking out loans to do it. Though I somewhat regret going at all, the biggest problem is that I now have 50k in student loans that I'm burdened with. I have struggled to find a job that pays enough to "warrant" those loans. I might feel differently if I had a higher income.
I think my biggest problem with this isn't so much that I have a $350 a month payment for the foreseeable future, it's that it makes me feel rather "locked" into using my degree. I don't know what else I could do that pays enough to support the loans and my other bills/expenses as a single person (I do not share finances with my BF, and he's a PhD student so that wouldn't help much anyway). There are jobs I might find interesting but I'd have to start out with pay too low to support myself, and I can't/shouldn't go back to school and add to my loans so a career change to what I want to do (counseling) would be very difficult. So I feel kind of stuck.
However, I met my BFF in grad school. I got my dog from a shelter in the town where I went to grad school. My degree meant I moved to Iowa, and Iowa is where I met my BF. So... a lot of unrelated, really wonderful things happened as a result of my grad degree. If I could have my BFF, my dog, and my boyfriend anyway, I'd do something different in a do-over situation. If not, I think I'll keep things as they are.
Post by hopenotlost on Jan 16, 2015 11:34:54 GMT -5
I have luckily not made a lot of poor MM decisions, but the biggest one was getting into credit card debt. It took us about 5 years to dig us out of that hole, but we have become smarter because of it. We know what it's like to eat cereal for meals for two weeks, because we couldn't afford anything else since we had a little baby and we made sure all her needs were met.
Oh wait, I take that back. I wouldn't have bought my Saturn SC2. That asshole was a beautiful car, but it was awful during the winter, and the damn engine had to be replaced 3 years after we bought it, and then something else happened with it. I sold it and made about a $2000 profit on it (which we put towards our credit card debt), but at the time...such a bad decision buying it.
What was your biggest MM mistake? Would you do it again because of what you learned or where it lead you? If not, what would you have done instead and how would it affect your life?
Definitely buying a 1 br/1 ba condo with 0 down in the frothy market of March 2005. I have learned a lot from that but if I had to do it over, no I would NOT have bought it. I would have continued renting and saved my $$$$ for a proper down payment and would then have avoided the hell that is renting out a property at a loss for 5+ years when I moved out of state.
Post by UnderProtest on Jan 16, 2015 11:52:00 GMT -5
Mine would be agreeing to buy a vacation condo with my father in law in 2005. It is still underwater and it just further ties us to him. It has caused so much stress for my husband (and me) and it isn't over. He thinks he is going to retire there in the next year or so. You know, the man who just had a stroke and has been diagnosed with Parkinson's needs to move to a 3 story townhouse (garage only on ground level) where he knows no one and has no doctor network.
When DH was in undergrad and his first MA program, we partially lived off of his student loan refunds. Granted we both had to put ourselves through school with almost no help from parents, but now that he's knee deep in SL debt I wish we hadn't taken out those full payouts and just took what he needed for tuition.
Now he's back in another MA program on a graduate assistantship that's paying his tuition so no debt should come of this!
Turning down a major scholarship to a private 4 year college. My dad had just passed away and my mom needed me. It still feels like the biggest "what if" in my personal and early financial life.
I turned down a full scholarship to a really good law school to go to (what I thought was) a better one. I still can't decide if it was the right decision. I think my legal education has served me well, but I wonder if I would have been better off starting the game ~$150k richer.
We bought a hard to resell house on a weird lot and took a $40k hit when we sold. We got really lucky in that DH's company covered the loss as part of a relo package, but otherwise I think that would be our biggest mistake.
I didn't contribute to my 401(k) until almost 2 years after I started working. Stupid.
Buying our home, hands down our biggest mistake. We are now paying $$ for someone else to live there while we are on an international assignment. We can sell it for a loss of 1/3 of what we paid...we don't have that kind of $.
Post by mainelyfoolish on Jan 16, 2015 12:08:49 GMT -5
Going to law school because I didn't know what else to do with my life. I was lucky in that I figured out after the first year that I was never going to be happy working as an attorney and left school, but that one year was a 20k mistake.
We bought our forever home at 23/24 with crazy ass mortgages. Moving from 500 to 4,000 square feet was a little crazy, very expensive, and caused us to fall into $10k of credit card debt because we started furnishing rooms before we we're ready to pay cash for it.
Two refinances later, we have a mortgage that is reasonable in term, rate, and structure, but man I always wonder how life would be different if we hadnt fallen into the housing bubble nonsense.
Being a cash hoarder during the recession. I was an all-or-nothing thinker and thought I couldnt contribute to a Roth AND build my emergency fund at the same time. So I waited till my e-fund was full and didn't start buying investments until 2010 I think? I still made out pretty well but DH made a ton more and had been begging me to invest and I ignored him.
Post by Emerald1486 on Jan 16, 2015 12:29:05 GMT -5
Avoiding credit cards when I was in college. When I bought my first car I had no credit history and a 12.99% interest rate on my car loan. 7 years later I had to buy a newer car. This time I had a credit history and got a 2.95% rate. I would have started investing my 401k earlier and transferred the money as I changed jobs. I wanted to wait until I had a "steady" job so I ended up not starting one till after college in 2008.
Going to law school. I only practiced for about 2 years. Thankfully, this was almost 20 years ago and I had a partial scholarship, so it wasn't as bad as it could be. Still, an expensive mistake.
Both DH and I buying two flats at the (almost) top of the market. We were in our 30's and had just started dating and we both bought multi units. It would have worked out so much better if we would have bought one together. Thankfully, the one we don't live in breaks about even, but it would still be better not to have it.
Hands down, getting into credit card debt. That set us back so much in our 20s. Our savings and retirement surely suffered for it, and we bought a house later than we wanted.
Blind trust of a commission based financial advisor. I received a substantial insurance payout and not knowing anything about investing, let him sell me really expensive funds and a crappy annuity contract.
I honestly can't think of one quite yet, which means it's probably going to be our new house...lord I hope not.
This is where I'm at right now. We took somewhat of a gamble on buying a house we were only planning on owning for 4-5 years and we'll likely find out sometime in the next year if it was a big mistake or not.
Buying a "fixer upper" house. My husband is really handy, and I was under the (mistaken) impression that he'd be willing to do some of the necessary fixes himself, or with help from our (also handy) family members. Five years later, and the only things that have been done are things that we paid people to do. Had I known, the house would not have seemed like such a good deal. I'm really frustrated by this lately.
We also are losing an enormous amount of money by hoarding cash rather than investing.
Not keeping tabs on mom's finances between 2008-2012. Once in a while I would say to myself that I should check up on her. But it was all so unpleasant to deal with and she was 2500 miles away.
She didn't pay her property taxes, and this was post-crash so the county had become a superlien jurisdiction. To get the house back we had to pay the tax auction purchasers a TWENTY PERCENT premium over their purchase price. Nice work if you can get it.
Obviously I wouldn't do this again. And I'm going to have regular meetings with my kids about our retirement starting at about 60.
Post by liveintheville on Jan 16, 2015 14:38:51 GMT -5
We used our emergency fund to have a nanny for 2 years. But looking back on it I don't see what other option we had. Maybe we could have cut down on his hours but he's like family to us.
We bought our first house is 2007. It was a mistake in so many ways. The house was "remodeled", major issues were concealed, and I was 21 and stupid. We were able to get out of the mess in January 2012 and I still feel like we're in recovery from it.
Well, I don't consider it a mistake because we literally could not have made it if we had not done this, but I wish we hadn't had to do it. DH cashed out an old 401k to pay off our car. We had just had our second child, DH left his corporate job and we were cash flowing his degree while he worked at a nonprofit for around a quarter of his previous salary, and the car payment was around $500 with the balance of our trade-in on the loan as well. It wasn't that much, but I wish we had been able to leave it alone. When we bought the car we were childless and his salary was in the low six figures with a company car and expense account. Three years later, a lot had changed. I guess we shouldn't have bought the car in the first place, but hindsight blah blah.
Buying my condo at the peak of the market. It's sloooowly recovering it's value, but at one point it was $190k underwater. I just want to break even someday and unload it.
No I wouldn't repeat that purchase. If I hadn't, we could've bought a comparable house much earlier (and probably cheaper because we could've picked up a circa '08/09 foreclosure), and in a more exclusive area.