Doesn’t have to be thousands of dollars. Just a thing you spent money on that turned out to be a complete waste.
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.
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.
so I bought a cheap old Porsche…I realize now there is no such thing.
Got convinced by someone I very much trusted to join an MLM as a 19 or 20 year old. After my parents learned about it, they were able to talk some sense into me, and I realized I was part of a pyramid scheme. I got out and basically broke even, which was honestly the best possible outcome of that whole scenario. It unfortunately degraded my relationship with the person who convinced me to join, and I never really could fully trust them after that.
Which MLM?
It was Stream Energy/Ignite Inc. The energy markets in many US states are open to suppliers other than the utility companies. Ignite/Stream offered bad utility rates with pyramid scheme marketing tactics and eventually were sued. Complaint here
Woah. That’s not your typical belly wraps, Tupperware, or make-up mlm.
That’s part of what made it sound good at first. It sounded like a unique opportunity with a “legitimate” company, and I was too young and inexperienced to really understand the implications of it, especially when coming from someone I had known for over a decade and really trusted.
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University
I spent 50 grand and 4 years of my life to be told by prospective employers that I either lacked real world experience, or that I was overqualified. It took me another 3 years to find a job after university - one that doesn’t require training and is barely relevant to my field.
I get to hang a pretty piece of paper up on my wall, I guess.
Overall, I guess this wins
Yeah that’s rough. I can kind of say the same. The career I chose doesn’t require the degree I have. It absolutely helps but if I could go back, I would have just gotten licensed at 18 and started working in the trade. Degree is mechanical engineering, trade is operations side of stationary engineering.
I’m sad I didn’t experience university, it sounds like a great time. Parties, drinking, last minute assignments…
Waiting for the bubble to burst before buying a house.
Anytime now…
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
It will the day I buy.
I was waiting too. Sorry buddy.
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.
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).
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!
I was young and dumb and didn’t know how to say no.
Timeshare.
It’s so hard to get rid of. Fuck that thing.
I was married, in my 40’s and listened to my now ex hubby #2 because his family had several. The payment was $600 a month… a second mortgage for a one week vacation? The timeshare, nor our marriage, lasted long after that.
How is that presented as good deal up front?
Well. Since his parents have theirs paid off, it’s a mere $1,000 a year maintenance. But no. Ours was primo Washington DC/NYC (we lived in Philly at the time) and he had champagne tastes on a soda budget. I did not trust my gut as I should have.
Maybe I’m lucky, but I just stopped paying the maintenance fees. It never showed up on my credit, the phone calls stopped years ago, and all I get is the occasional scam offer in the mail to help me sell it.
Ooo thats a rough one.
formatted my drive 2010 thinking the bitcoin scam would not last so long.
I knew about bitcoin so early that at the time there was still a “bitcoin faucet” website giving them away for free, but between procrastination and skepticism I never bothered getting any.
Me, I falsely assumed crypto would be regulated by now. Also got scammed out of the proceeds from a doge coin miner my peers and I had infected our school wifi with. Only learned jack all about mining for it’s relation to cryptographic mathmatics, ha.
Even though I knew about Bitcoin in 2009, I don’t regret not buying into it at the start. Either I would have sold off at a dollar, because it “couldn’t possibly go any higher than that” and then regret not holding onto it for the rest of my life, or I would be extremely rich and be a much worse person because of it.
I still have almost two coins in a corrupted wallet file I’ve never been able to fix from when I mined them on my crappy little laptop back then :-(
Wallet file from what?
Bitcoins are stored in a wallet file. My file got messed up. I’ve had this wallet.bat file for like 16 years now, just mocking me.
.bat? Did you mean .dat?
I meant as in what wallet software, there are multiple talking the same protocol. Unless you mean Bitcoin Core specifically (the og).
Yeah. Dat file. I do mean OG bit coin. I mined it back in like 2010 when they were worth next to nothing. Like 20 cents a piece. There were no forks.
It should be an sqlite database. The modern docs say so, I am not exactly sure if it was the case in 2010.
Is it bigger than 0 bytes? Try opening in https://sqlitebrowser.org/ . I don’t know if it uses SQLcipher (probably not), but if you are using the Windows installer you should probably tick that there just in case.
EDIT: just a thought, if you can’t get it just give it to me (not here tho, Tox
F857EB6604B99A58ADD0965CEDFCBF78CF0BDF939DA7290D8D84117D8DE30C3F91B5EA9226E8), I will try some basic fuckery on it and do splitsies. It can go in these ways:- Nobody gets your coins - sad
- I get your coins and lie - sad, but also you kinda didn’t loose anything
- I get your coins and give you ~1BTC - bliss
Not a big one, but surely the worst one. There was a “make your own perfume” stall in our college fest. I didn’t like the fragrance of most of what they had to offer. It took me time to pick one, but I picked one that I thought was the most unique one.
Then when I came home, I realised it smelt exactly like my dad’s car freshner.
Rolling over a payday loan. You write them a check for $300 post dated for payday, they hand you $255. On payday, I would go back with a fresh $300 check to replace the one they just cashed so they could hand me another $255. This would be after exhausting overdraft from my checking that cost something like $35 to overdraw by $200. I wasn’t even on hard drugs or drinking, just weed and nicotine. By the time I was 30 I had $15k in financial judgements against me, it took another 4 years to pay everything off. It almost cost me a promotion during the credit check. Apparently you shouldn’t be a financial advisor if you’re terrible with your own finances but I talked my way out of it (and then failed as a financial advisor).
That’s pretty shocking - it sounds like the actual problem was being $255 short the and just never catching up.
An old job where transportation literally cost me half my salary.
Too many people don’t factor in the cost of transportation, and it’s such a big one, especially now. In the midwest especially I know I did. I got a new job that was an hour away by car, which is about 40 miles including navigating from my city, the interstate, and the destination city. I knew my old car wouldn’t make it that much, so I bought a new car to help (and stupid younger me thought I looked cooler with it). At the time, gas was about $3/gallon and I got 30mpg highway, and I’ll round down to account for city mileage. So about 2.5 gallons of gas per work day, so $7.50 a day, or $150 a month. That’s $1,800 a year gone to gas alone.
Then add in that new car payment ($500/month), and higher insurance (+250/month compared to previous insurance) and that’s $10.800 a year just to get to work, not counting anything else.
Then I think that I took the job because I could get 20k more than my current job in the same city thinking “oh that’s so much more money”. Only looking back do I realize I immediately lost over half of that just to driving there, plus probably ~6,000 to taxes. So my “cool” new job in the other city netted me about $3,200 additional in my pocket per year, which is an additional $250 a month. Was it worth the additional stress of driving 2 hours every day, 40 hours a month (an additional work week every month) just for $250 a month? Probably not.
Yeah… Bought a luxury sport car years ago. Gas was $2.5-3 for premium, now it’s over $6! I spend almost $350/mo now for roughly my 1k miles a month.
There are “True cost of driving” calculators to help understand this. Some of them are really involved. This one suggested to me that even my small, old hatchback costs something like $0.40 per mile, including depreciation, maintenance, fuel and so on.
One thing that most of us don’t have a gut feeling for: Even at $4-6 per gallon, fuel is usually not the biggest cost involved. That’s a lousy situation, because it means we don’t react to the real costs. “Market forces” can’t work if most of us don’t feel their pressures because we’re looking in the wrong places.
If you don’t feel like dealing with a complicated calculator, you can check how big a deduction the IRS allows for a mile of business use driving. This year it’s around $0.70.
Oh fuck that
