Doesn’t have to be thousands of dollars. Just a thing you spent money on that turned out to be a complete waste.
Changed over the ownership of the house I bought with my own money to my now ex because he was the one with the job. Am now house-less and renting an apartment at triple the mortgage payments.
I made a lot of mistakes divorcing my husband last year so there’s plenty of mistakes to go around. I lost my job six months before we separated and that made me feel powerless. Only now am I reclaiming my power, happiness, and inner peace. Sending good vibes your way as you grow in strength and knowledge.
fuck man, sorry to hear!
Early in my software dev career I had a contract job at a young company called Microsoft. Without going into boring details, what I saw in terms of miscommunication, wasteful practices, and odd behaviors by overstressed managers led me to see it as a typical startup that was outgrowing its ability to run itself. At that time they were handing out full-time employment like candy - most of the programmers in my hallway got converted - but I left, because I didn’t think the company would go anywhere. This was two or three years before the stock went nuts and programmers there became millionaires in their twenties.
Waiting for the bubble to burst before buying a house.
Anytime now…
It will the day I buy.
Ha, get ready for hyper inflation, your saved dollars will lose their value. All the rich finance bros will get sweetheart loan deals and buy up every scrap. Enter into fascist-feudal world. Where it gets hotter every year. Fuck you is the general plan I guess.
I don’t have dollars.
Haven’t you seen late-night infomercials? You can buy real estate with no money down!!!
I mean I don’t have dollars as currency.
I live in RestOfTheWorldStan
I was waiting too. Sorry buddy.
When I was 25 I was making a lot of money. So I bought my childhood dream car, you know the one you have on your wall with the chick in a bikini on the hood. So I bought a '98 Diablo VT with I believe around 3k miles (this was in 2001). It was the absolute piece of shit. Don’t get me wrong, it was gorgeous and sounded twice as sexy. But I shit you not, every other time it left the garage the most random shit would break, crap that shouldn’t break on a car with 3k miles and 3 years old. Spark plugs were fowled, radiator hose blew, wires would be frayed and cause electrical issues. It was like non-stop. I soldnit for a 20k loss.
Mind you I’m 43 now and own 9 cars, 4 motorcycles, and grew up building engines with my dad. So I have no issues working on cars or doing whatever. I can tell tell you outside of Jeep, that Lamborghini was the biggest piece of mentally handicapped engineered vehicle I’ve ever seen.
mentally handicapped engineered
i feel old now
(seriously though, i feel like this attempt at an euphemism misses and in fact intensifies the reason we don’t use that word)
We all want to see your collection posted on here man
Jeeps - there’s an old movie about a small town infested with C.H.U.D.-like critters underground. As the plot crawls along, multiple characters keep saying bad things about their Jeeps, like “Could you drive? My Jeep is still in the shop.” By the end it’s pretty obvious somebody didn’t like Jeeps. Then during the credits the director drives up in a Jeep, gets out and says, “They say every story has a moral, and I guess the moral of this one is, Don’t Buy a Jeep.” Then he tries and tries to start it and finally gives up. I probably saw this back in the 80s on Showtime, and I’ve been searching for it ever since we got the Internet lol.
Not the worst, but the weirdest:
When I got my first credit card they told me that the very first transaction would be divided into 12 monthly payments, with no interest. So my first purchase was a new cellphone that I needed.
Later the same day I bought something for like a dollar, and just to be funny I paid it with the credit card.
Well, that $1 dollar purchase was also divided into 12 payments. Nothing bad happened because of that, but it just felt stupid.
I was conned into going into ITT Tech out of high school. I learned a lot but didn’t find out until later it was unaccredited so nothing would transfer to colleges and that they had lied heavily about their placement numbers. There were a few issues keeping from going after them: it was my parent’s money, the point in time I went wasn’t part of the lawsuit, and my parents were dead when the lawsuit came about. I cannot put ITT Tech on my resume because of everything related to it, it’s a literal black mark. So I have to stretch the truth of those two years because of it.
so I bought a cheap old Porsche…I realize now there is no such thing.
The most recent was waiting for the 32GB RAM sticks I needed to max out my hypervisor to go on sale below $120.
Quit my job start of this year. Thought I could start a self employed thing with a secure client but they bailed (turns out they just went with my previous employer for lower prices).
I used to sell plasma, and I used the funds on Robinhood to try investing without affecting my regular cash flow. Through sheer luck, in one day, my account went from around $200 to over $2500. I was overjoyed. I’d clearly made a genius-level decision that would only continue to pay out.
Anyway, I woke up the next day with less than I’d had to start. Should’ve taken the money and run. Or not tried to time the market. Either way, it felt like I’d lost $2300 instead of $50.
Need to read a random walk down wall street. Great book. The premise is no matter what news story hits the market, that information is already reflected in the stock price. Therefore, his theory is that you cannot out beat the market and it is in your best interest to dollar cost average a market tracker. That is investing. Myself I believe what you are describing is gambling.
The premise is no matter what news story hits the market, that information is already reflected in the stock price. Therefore, his theory is that you cannot out beat the market and it is in your best interest to dollar cost average a market tracker.
I have a single digit percent allocation of single company stocks I pick myself. They are very useful as a constant reminder at how bad I am at picking single stocks to encourage me to leave the majority of my investments in boring index funds I strictly buy-and-hold.
Great idea small amounts willing to lose.
Haven’t read that book, but I’ve been very successful with the opposite approach. A favorable article about a company’s stock in popular mainstream media (not business publications) can push the stock up briefly over the next couple weeks based on false hopes of the clueless general public. Get in immediately, get out within a couple days if nothing happens, and within 2 weeks if it does. My other rule is only do this with options, not actual stocks. And yes, I too would call this gambling - but investing is never not gambling. It’s just more or less so depending on how you do it.
That is true investing is never not gambling but a lot of people use like their savings for what you would do and that’s the difference. Its like the casino, go into it with the amount of money you are willing to lose. If you can’t lose that money don’t go into the casino. Same principal with individual stock picks and options.
Might want to check this out: Beat The Couch.
That’s an interesting game but it assumes the same amount either in or out all at once. Not what I’m describing where each month you invest a set amount into the market each time. This is what 401ks do. While the beat the couch is pretty cool it doesn’t take into account the dollar cost averaging aspect. It’s all in or all out. It’s not in, then buy more, then buy more, then buy more then buy more etc…you get the picture.
Having said that it is absolutely true that time in the market is better than timing the market.
I fully agree it’s not a complete stock market model, but I don’t think It claims to be.
I don’t remember it addressing what happened to dividends paid; are they just banked, reinvested, etc.
It’s certainly a cool tool
This is why I don’t invest. I tried it for a relatively short span of time. It was a large company that isn’t a scam or anything but I can’t remember the name of it. They had three sort of options for investing…1. high risk/reward, 2. Medium risk/reward, and 3. Low risk/reward.
I either picked 2 or 3 or something. Can’t remember which. All that stupid thing did was lose money due to broker fees. I watched the money slowly drop over the span of around a year from “fees” with literally never earning a dime. I thought it was ridiculous so I pulled the rest of the funds.
I instead chose to place that money in a high yield savings account. Does it earn money quickly? No. But it isn’t wildly unpredictable like investing and it will never lose money unless I take money out. Investing isn’t for me.
With all due respect, what you did was not investing; it was closer to speculating. If your time horizon is less than 5 years, what you should look at is a savings account/certificate of deposit, not the stock market.
I had a mutual fund once (the Putnam Health Sciences Trust) that went down three or four years in a row (probably about 30-35% total). The same financial advisors who recommend I buy it advised that I sell it for the last two years I owned it. I didn’t take their advice and held on to it - the next year it had about a 75% increase. I would have missed that and locked in my losses if I had listen to them.
I didn’t know 5 years was a cutoff for something be considered investing but ok.
Yes, you’re right. I could have decided to keep the account open for the next 10 years and maybe it might have eventually earned a single penny. But I chose not to because that’s just not what I’m interested in. You do you. It’s just not as easy and win-win as people make it out to be.
Absolutely, everyone should do themselves.
5 years is the minimum time frame I’ve heard for stock market investments; YMMV.
I instead chose to place that money in a high yield savings account. Does it earn money quickly? No. But it isn’t wildly unpredictable like investing and it will never lose money unless I take money out. Investing isn’t for me.
Even though I do invest in stocks, until recently I was a long time user of high yield savings accounts for years for my “safe” money. What I eventually realized was how the bank was able to pay me the comparatively higher interest rate for a savings account. Whatever money I had in the savings account they’d just buy short term US Treasuries (probably 4 week Tbills), they shave off .5%-1% interest earned for their company profit, and passed the remainder onto me. I finally sat down and learned how to cut out the middle man and buy the Tbills myself. So instead of the High Yield savings account paying me 3.01%, I’m earning 3.94% on the same money.
Also understand that Savings accounts and even Tbills usually drasically underperform compared to broad stock index funds. For example 2025 was 16.39% and 2024 was 23.21% returns for boring S&P500 funds.
Letting my partner quit their job so they could focus on working on a comic full-time… I completely supported them. Buying them supplies and whatever else they needed. This lasted 2 years… with absolutely nothing to show for it. NOTHING. I have no idea what the fuck they did 10 hours a day while I was at work.
you provided emotional support, I commend you for that. but they needed guidance as well, something you couldn’t possibly provide.
I have no idea what the fuck they did 10 hours a day while I was at work.
probably being depressed af 😅
Like, not even the comic?
I made a comic book while also working part time…not impossible.
Bruh I worked part time while working full time.
I bought a new, $100 android tablet a few years ago because I’d never had a tablet before and thought I’d try it. Assumed that since laptops around that price perform ok that it would be decent for basic stuff, but it really isn’t. Just not enough ram (4gb), lags when doing literally anything, can’t load most websites, can’t even play most videos without it turning into a slideshow. Can’t install a less shit more efficient OS. I would feel bad about reselling it because no one should be subjected to having to use this ewaste.
Not a tablet, but I used to use a Motorola phone from 2014 that only had 2 GB of RAM and ran most if not all things fine (even modern versions of Minecraft). Why does the tablet seem so much worse even with more RAM?
I’m not sure, my guesses would be newer android is more bloated and old models don’t get the updated versions, and that larger screens take more processing to render (although that would probably be more about stuff other than ram capacity).
Can’t root it?
I guess I could look into that more, but cursory research gave me the impression that there aren’t good options for tablets here. But I guess since it’s useless anyway it would be worth it if I could just set it up as a server somehow, maybe I will keep looking.
I’m running
GrapheneOSLineageOS on an older Samsung tablet that’s worked very wellI thought GrapheneOS only supported newer Pixel phones
Woops, I meant LineageOS!
Digital picture frame might be feasible
Why havent you named the make and model so us readers dont make your mistake!
I’d think that his point would apply to any 4GB Android tablet.
No such thing as E-waste! any phone, laptop, desktop or tablet that powers on can be re-purposed for something cool or salvaged for parts. I once made a usable laptop out of 3 dead ones and it gave me another year to save up for a replacement rather than having to emergency buy something cheap and shitty.
If you use Firefox for Android, you can install the uBlock ad blocker, which can reduce the load on your device substantially.
Maybe, but this thing literally lags in the settings menu with nothing else open
Worst would’ve been having a kid at 21, second worse was. It grasping how predatory credit cards can be. Survived the first but the 2nd one hurt the longest, now I treat credit cards like poison, I try to avoid carrying a balance at all costs and expend any extra funds to eliminate any balances before I look at other possible uses of that cash.
Credit card companies hate him!
You’re in the 1% or 2% of the population who actually learn from mistakes. Unloved by the business world for not being a profit faucet.
Not being born rich.
Changed major from civil engineering to computer science
