We’ve all made mistakes with money before, but a thread on AskReddit will probably have you feeling a lot better about yours. It asks, “What’s the worst financial decision you’ve seen someone make?” More than 9-thousand responses have come in and lets just hope we can all learn from these.
- "When I didn't buy Apple stock in the 1980s."
- "They applied for a $5,000 loan that didn’t get accepted quickly enough, so they applied for another $5,000 loan. Both got accepted, and they ended up gambling it all."
- "They bought a TV on Black Friday instead of fixing their leaking roof."
- "A guy in my fraternity got $30,000 for an undisclosed reason, and he bet it all on the Yankees winning one game. They lost."
- "A coworker worked every second of overtime he could for several years to save up for a house. When he applied for the house loan, he based his mortgage payment on all of the overtime he had been working. I tried to tell him that wasn't a good idea, but he didn't want to hear it. He ended up divorced a few years later because his wife got tired of him always working."
- "A dude who owned a small convenience store in our town spent, like, $20,000 on fidget spinners. He was posting for, like, a year begging people to buy them, because he was about to lose his business and his marriage was falling apart because of it."
- "He put everything in his girlfriend's name to hide his assets because of what he owed the IRS. The girlfriend sold his business, cashed out his accounts, and ran."
- "My supervisor took out a loan against their 401k to pay their rent because their 'credit cards were maxed.' Two weeks later, they bought a brand new $60,000 Lincoln with basically nothing down because her daughter just had a baby, 'and I need a bigger car for that.'"
- "My (awful) aunt was the trustee for my grandparents' estate. When they passed, she decided to sell their house to a random realtor who put a leaflet on the door — TO the realtor, directly. It wasn't put on the market, and the aunt rejected a matching offer by me after I argued hard to actually list the house and have people bid on it. The realtor slapped a new coat of paint on it and sold it a couple of months later for literally a million dollars more than she bought it for."
- "My former sister-in-law had a thriving medical practice. She got so stressed that she joined Scientology and started taking their classes. She opened up five or six credit cards without telling my brother, maxed the cards out with hundreds of thousands in cash withdrawals, and gave it to them."
- "They cashed in their 401k to have a cocaine party."
- "Someone I know took a loan to order a pizza."
- "Had a coworker with five kids who could all go to USC for free once he had worked there for 15 years, even if he quit. He quit at 14 1/2 years for a job that barely paid more than he made at USC. He cost all five kids a free education at a top school because he couldn't wait six more months."
- "I knew someone who got a loan for their wedding, but decided to blow it all at a casino. Now they have a loan for 20k to pay off and nothing to show for it."
Source: Reddit