Once fell for a high yield bitcoin scam.

Not buying $100 bitcoin when it was $0.00001

Probably not exactly what you meant, but not going to college with my group of friends that did. They went for computer science because they were interested in it and are now doing very well for themselves. I was never that interested in it and am more “hands on” with physical stuff so I didn’t feel like I should “waste” the money on that degree and figured I would spend time trying to figure out what I could do.

I never “found myself” and am currently living in someone’s garage making not much money working in a factory that’s going to be over 90°F today with 75+% humidity… So in my case the financial mistake was not taking out a loan. :/

I had two: I fell for a predatory gym membership for 24/7 Hour Fitness that charged my card even though I couldn’t enter the damn place without paying for an access card because “it expired”. The fuCK? And years later, fell for another one because the credit card was imposed on me by an Amazon subcontractor during training. They made it seem mandatory for logistical reasons, and I was oblivious. They made it as hard as possible to cancel the damn thing so a lot of people fucked over their credit.

I’ve learned a lot since.

I trusted a family member.

They promised to let me rent the house I had grown up in until I have the money to buy it. At the beginning, I was still a university student with a part-time job so this quickly ate up my savings but I figured it was worth it. Then, about a year after I had finally finished university and had started working full time, they suddenly decided to set an ultimatum of about six months for me to buy the house or leave, even threatening to hire a gardener at my cost to make the property more attractive to buyers.

I pleaded, fought, tried to get a loan but of course without any savings as security, nobody would give me one. I had to move into an apartment, that’s smaller, older and more expensive than the house that had been my home for 23 years. While I’m not in debt, I still struggle to build up enough savings to get a loan for a home, even after eight years on a software engineer’s salary.

I’ve completely cut ties with that side of the family and I still occasionally have nightmares about the whole situation.

I was the tech director of a small video game start-up. Our investment dried up but I didn’t want to lay off our employees so I kept the company going, burning through my savings, and not taking a salary myself, while hoping the finance director could sort out new investment.

He couldn’t. We had to wind the company up anyway and I had nothing left. That lead to some hard times.

Your mistake wasn’t the woman.

It was your inability to say no and set boundaries, especially when it involved money.

I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.

I didn’t know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.

I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of “picking yourself up by your bootstraps,” so I usually trusted him for financial advice.

He told me that he’d never heard of this “TSP thing” and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other “more legitimate” options for investing my money.

So I didn’t enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.

For all my dad’s knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn’t have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like “set up a Roth IRA” (whatever that was) and “pay attention to what’s happening on Wall Street.” I really shouldn’t have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.

Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.

Today, I’m 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it’s nowhere near $1 million.

All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could’ve had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I’m surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.

I’m not hurting financially, but I’m also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I’m probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don’t really have money to throw around.

I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to “class-jump” like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.

I was mining bitcoin in the very early days (when bitcoins were worth pennies). No idea how much it was and is worth now, but I am pretty sure I’d never have to work again if I still had access to these bitcoins.

Droppping out of college after 5 years. Instantly got me 30k debt.

I sold all my Nvidia stick right before the AI boom.