Learning from past mistakes
Free Money Finance talked recently about financial disasters, asking what’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you financially?
In my case, I think that the negative things that have “happened” to me financially have been the direct result of me either not planning ahead or me making poor decisions. Or sometimes both! In other words, they were natural consequences, and I (thankfully) did learn my lessons from them.
Here are two that stand out for me:
I paid for someone else’s debts.
When I was about 19, I took on debts that were not in any way my responsibility and paid them. As a result of my actions I got to spend months with literally 10 cents a day left to spend for supper.
This did teach me to be creative and to really, really appreciate what I’d had in the past (and what I came to have in the future) so I’m not so sure that part was really a negative. But it sucked at the time, so much so that I came to resent the person whose debts I paid. Forgetting that they didn’t ask me to pay them.
Lessons learned? People need to be responsible for their own actions. Don’t try to “help”. That’s called enabling.
I leased a minivan.
My then-husband and I leased an expensive minivan for him to drive — one that cost more than we both made in a year combined. Can you say stupid decision? Oh but it was so nice, and we could “afford” the payments. (Barely.)
Then, about a year later, it randomly caught fire and burned to the ground. It wasn’t even recognizable as a car afterward.
Guess what regular car insurance doesn’t cover? The difference between what you owe on the car and what they will pay you.
Yeah, we ended up owing money on a minivan we no longer owned. This one’s stupid for at least three reasons: leasing a vehicle, leasing a vehicle we couldn’t even remotely truly afford, and not getting gap insurance.
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