Doesn’t have to be thousands of dollars. Just a thing you spent money on that turned out to be a complete waste.
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…
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.
fuck man, sorry to hear!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh fuck that
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.
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
Listened to the internet and held onto Gamestop for longer than I should have.
I still did ok, but fuck I could have paid off my mortgage.
To be fair, they trading commission did some really shady and imo illegal shit to cut the legs out from under the squeeze.
Rules for thee and not for…
Having also been part of the community but not letting the hype take over logic, I’m also convinced a lot of shady and illegal shit was going on.
And still is, on the stock market.
Awe man. I managed to minimize my winnings. Sold a call. I figured cool get some action. Yes, that was a 400% profit but if I had taken the opposite (buy the call instead), it could own a new car. Anyway. I’m happy you paid off your mortgage.
… I think you misread.
alcohol
This one cost me a lot more than dollars.
At ~A$130 a week (2x 1L bottles of scotch and rum, and 2 x 24pk of beer(24x500ml), for 17 years, my math works out to be about $115k over the course of my drinking career.
8pack/day was $20/day or $600/month aka mortgage or car payment.
Today im having shrooms with the equinox.
Damn, makes me feel better about my 5k of whisky bottles
Ho ly. Ain’t that the truth. Getting drunk twice a week, juat spending around 100 bucks per day was truly a decision of all times.
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.
Bought a house with my ex and we were instantly house poor. We didn’t account for buying things for the house at all. Ended up selling and moving two years later at a loss even though we sold for a bit more than we bought it for.
Almost every single movie I’ve seen in theaters. At home is just better. Hell, sometimes the bike ride with my partner to and from the place is better than the movie-- could have just hung out at a park, lol.
I think this is mostly because movies are not really a shared experience any longer. The closest I’ve had recently to a cinema experience that you wouldn’t be able to replicate at home was the end of Infinity War. Sure if you had a heap of friends over it might be close but the underlying feeling of dread, sadness, anger and confusion could be felt as you were leaving the cinema made it worth it imo.
I’m hoping Doomsday will be similar in the way it handles things but if it pulls another Force Awakens I’m gonna be annoyed.
I have a bag of popcorn on standby for when I watch a movie. In the Quest 3 i can play the movie in a cinema environment. Full giant screen experience, excellent sound with headphones, can pause it for a pee break, and it costs me nothing. Would definitely recommend. And there’s no one else in the cinema either. Perfect experience
Underestimating the lengths that Trump admin would go to prop up equity markets during COVID
This one got me too/is still getting me.
Leasing a car.
I’d always bought a car and driven it into the ground. Leased an EV once. Hated the experience. Felt ripped off at the end.
Bought a used car after that. Back to normal.
I have never bought a vehicle for more than $5k, and most were 25+ years old when purchased. Most lasted 10+ years with virtually no significant repairs beyond the post-purchase glow-up.
Downside is that I have been hankering to get into an electric for some time now, but I am running into a few blockers:
- 10yo Chevy Bolts are still $20k+ CAD
- I refuse to fund/promote fascism with a Swasticar
- None exist with ease of repairability, and DRM is growing every year
- None exist without significant privacy concerns
- I will never tolerate a subscription - I will gleefully crack the software at the first opportunity
I’ll never buy an EV due to all of the reasons you listed. I’d say our next vehicle will be a 90s Toyo/Nissan/Honda sedan. I’ll gladly drive my current Subaru until it dies though. Hoping for 10+ years out of it.
For me, the issue with my older vehicles is the cost of fuel. The math is clear - an EV is radically cheaper over the long haul, especially for something like a sedan. Plus, far fewer moving parts to break.
I think, however, that a conversion of an older car is the trick. Sure, modern EVs are a shitton heavier, but only if you want it to go 700-1,200km. I don’t. I would only need a 100-200km range because bombing around town will be it’s only duty. Which means far fewer batteries and a powertrain weight that likely matches the original engine and drivetrain, allowing me to retain the original suspension as-is.
Cheaper for now. Don’t think for a second that costs will remain low when the majority of drivers switch. The population is used to budgeting x amount of money for fuel monthly, don’t think for a second that the cooperate owners will allow those savings to become the norm.
EV is cheaper now but it’ll likely get enshitified like everything else in this country. They will just use the excuse that more people using the grid = higher cost per kWh. When we all know that the data centers are using far more energy than single family homes charging a Chevy Bolt.
None exist without significant privacy concerns
Slate Truck. Extremely stripped-down. No cell radio. No GPS radio. No WiFi or Bluetooth, unless you stick some kind of hardware that can do them in there. Hell, no touchscreen car computer, just a place you can mount a tablet if you want. Doesn’t even have automatic windows as a base option. Aside from having airbags, air conditioner, and being an EV, basically a 1980s-style vehicle.
It’ll fail some of your other requirements, because it’s new and you’d need a used vehicle to hit a $5k price point. Just pointing out that it’ll meet the privacy point.
I do agree that it is depressingly rare to find modern cars that don’t have privacy issues. It’s not that I expected all of them to be privacy friendly, but I expected there to be more options.
Slate is also funding Fascism, being a Bezos project.
But it hits most other requirements, true.
Downside is that I want and need a traditional sedan with a full-sized trunk capable of securely holding at least 3-6 adult bodies, not a truck. If I was to get a truck, I also need it to haul 5,000kg on the regular across steep/alpine roads, 8,000kg+ in a pinch over mostly flat and level roads. The Slate truck is utterly incapable of that. And I have two F-150 7700 units that can and have done exactly that.
- None exist without significant privacy concerns
Eh, I removed the SIM chip from my 2015 Nissan Leaf. Took about 15 minutes with a screwdriver and YouTube.
Yeah my current mechanic strongly advises I keep my 15y/o car as long as I can and basically never even consider an EV as they currently exist.
Your mechanic likely isn’t learning how to work on EVs and has a monetary interest in you not buying an EV that requires next to no maintenance.
Your mechanic likely isn’t learning how to work on EVs
Many EVs have DRM out the wazoo, requiring the mechanic to spend $1,000,000 on a piece of software that has a $6,000/mo subscription just to authorize a brake replacement with the mothership. Otherwise the vehicle refuses to even roll, much less move under its own power.
And then the mechanic needs to rinse-and-repeat this spending spree with every other manufacturer who is also making EVs.
That shit becomes prohibitively expensive shockingly fast. And manufacturers are going whole-hog on this technique to send people back to dealer garages (who don’t have to pay those fees) for a slice of those profits, instead of independent shops that provide no profits whatsoever. They’re literally enshittifying cars until the only people capable of fixing them are dealers, or those independent shops who got wealthy enough fast enough to pay for that software.
If leasing was a good deal for the customer they wouldn’t let you do it.
I leased a non Tesla electric car and handing them back a car that has a residual value in the contract of $32000 but an actual market value of $20000 makes me feel like a got $12k of value out of the lease I didn’t earn. In 2.5 years it has cost me maybe and extra $600 in electric to drive 25k miles.
I did kind of the same thing but just a new Acura. I did love the car, but toward the end of the lease it felt like I was renting an AirBnB, making sure nothing fucked it up right at the end and making sure I kept it under the mileage agreement.
Waiting for the bubble to burst before buying a house.
Anytime now…
It will the day I buy.
I was waiting too. Sorry buddy.
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.
