OT: Your Worst Investment

Would you say that I'm a terrible Father if I said my son's college tuition ? Over $80,000 spent. And he still lives at home with me. ( OK, I"m not serious. He got a lot of "experiences" out of it, right ? )

GM stock comes to mind...........but then who knew we were going to throw out rule of law in 2008.

I came very close to buying a bar when I was in my mid -20's but at the last minute fell apart. In hindsight it was probably the closest I ever came to really screwing up.

Might not be a popular but investing in college instead of strip clubbing has been so far a way of not investing on my youth. Fuck that if I could turn back time I would. Total waste of money. I will never not put my dick first ever again.

I purchased a strip club on the edge of the everglades. It was going to be my retirement income but a but of snot-nosed kids from Angel Beach High School destroyed it.

^^ I knew I recognized you. I thought you were a little "porky" when I met you.

Not too many financial regrets but buying a new $60,000 car was not a super prudent financial decision. It didn’t send me back in any way financially, there are just better ways to invest or spend money. If money is tight, don’t stretch yourself on a car. It’s not worth it.

For anyone else out there on the topic of: should I spend money on college or not.....

Get a four year college degree if you can. It doesn’t matter so much what school you go to but the number of career options that will open up and the earning potential is huge.

My opinion is that masters degrees and other degrees after undergraduate are not worth it unless your field of study requires it, i.e. law, doctor, education.

My worst and still best investment was purchasing a rental home for my brother in law. That was 15 years ago. $1000/ month mortgage. He lived in it 3 years, tore the shit out of it and never paid a dime. When he moved out, i met some people down on their luck needing a home to live in. Again, no rent ever collected. Over the 15 years, Zimbabwe allowed 5 families who were down on their luck to
Live there rent free until they could move forward. Worst money investment ever, but best investment in humanity... I think. I have a heart for families with children who need help.

WTF ?! Where did Zimbabwe come from?!! That word is supposed to say “ I have allowed”

Second worst investment. The £80 I spent at a club in London, England last night. More on that in a review soon.

£80 is about $100 btw so not that much really. Just not a great experience.

I've been pretty careful about how I invested my money over the years but what could have been my worst investment was the one I didn't make. A friend of mine bought into a scheme that he was super excited about and wanted me to get involved. I went to a meeting where guests of the buy in group were hit with a sales pitch. I didn't like what I saw and heard, It had pyramid scam written all over it so I declined buying in and my then friend became a former friend. Within a year the state got involved and shut it down. I'm not sure what happened to the people at the top but the people that bought in lost everything.

My brother in law call horses "Hay burners" and comments on how the cost too much $$$. Labor of love...

My worst investment was Level 3 Communications. I got in on the fiber hype and rode it up to multiples of my my investment fell in love and rode it down like a pathetic loser in love with a sexy but life crashing bitch. Lesson learned...dont fall in love with a stock.

My investment decisions have been overall good and I am on track for retiring at the full time gig at 55.

A very profitable investment for me recently has been GWPH and I am in danger of going full PL on this one since the competitive space for their product has high barriers of entry. FDA approved cannabis derived epilepsy treatment. It's the real deal.

2nd wife

Investment homes. One went well and I parlayed it into another. Needless to say I’ve had it for years and after repairs and time spent, I figured out I’d have been way better off putting that $$ into mutual funds or index funds. Less maintenance is the vehicle I’m going forward with, and no liabilities with homeownership.

i was a vegas stripclub junkie for over three years.

I spent two years chasing a PhD in a field so esoteric that the only job it would have qualified me for would have been to become a college professor.

I was too young and naïve to be chasing a PhD.

I dropped out of the PhD program at age 23 and went to work so I could grow up a little and then figure out what to do with my life.

Realizing at age 23 that I was really not as mature as I had previously thought was undoubtedly the most mature thought I’d ever had up to that point in my life.

I lost $30K taking 2 second trust deeds on houses that I had never seen on the advice of my brother in law. The owners never paid a dime on the loans. I had to foreclose on them. One had a renter in it that refused to pay any rent until I fixed some of the things wrong with it. That would have been a waste of money. It was a real shit hole. I wasted a couple of grand on the other one and then tried to sell it. I wound up defaulting to the first mortgage holder on both houses. The ended my real estate investing.

My worst investment was buying a foreclosed vacant commercial building with very little experience or knowledge about 40 years ago, had no idea how much was wrong with the property and overestimated my own skills at that young age, fortunately for me, I had a good friend and mentor who helped me figure it out and eventually I was able to fix everything and rent it out, it took almost 3 years but I sold the property and recouped my losses, even made a small profit.

I purchased an all-inclusive trip to the Ramada in Las Vegas when I was in my 20s, shortly after college, and the never took it. I don't remember much in the way of details, but that was the dumbest investment I ever made, and relatively minor. I've always understood the importance of money and have been pretty shrewd.

Back in the early 80's I had a job that paid very well and had excellent benefits and bonuses. I used my windfall in the 2 years to buy JNJ, 0 coupon bonds and some art.

The bonds and JNJ did very well. I am still waiting for the artist to die to see if it drums up any interest in my art.

For a former company I worked for over 10 years back, I went in heavy on the their employee stock purchase plan. When I was buying in, it was in the mid 30s per stock...buy the time I left, it had gone to junk and was trading at just under 2.

Lost a shit ton of money and have been petrified of investing too much (outside of my 401K) into stocks since.

I used to play around with buying liens on distressed properties back around 2009. I once payed $15K for a lien, had a real-estate attorney check over the transaction, and ended up losing all the money. Later the real-estate agent who helped me ended up in jail and in the newspaper.

Is it a humble brag when someone says that they made a profit on their worst ever investment, or is it a lie?

I once paid a Vegas gal $600 and had to boot her out because the yeast smell was overpowering. I’m mildly gluten intolerant so she had to go. That was a bad investment.

@flagooner It is not a humble brag if you look at the time cost or opportunity lost, I could have done much better with more knowledge and better evaluation of the subject than I had at that time, but I always look for ways to make losers into winners so I’ll accept humble brag if that’s what you want to call it.

In 1987 a merger forced me to move from CA to GA. Most of us sold our homes and bought new ones here. Some hung on to theirs for retirement and rented them out. I was not concerned with retirement and sold my 4 bedroom pool home for a nice price of $205K. Today Zillow lists it for $800K. On the bright side. I have NO desire to move back to CA.

In my early 20s, a Dean Witter stockbroker talked me into buying stock in a satellite company that went to $0. DW was probably making a market in the piece of shit. Fuckers.

That was when I decided to educate myself and forever do my own analysis and make my own decisions.

Know what you own and why you own it.

Everyone knows (or should know) that buying new cars is generally not a good "investment". (even if they are a lot of fun to drive.) Here's some depreciation numbers for 3 expensive sports cars I've owned:

$23K (10 years), $20K (3 years), $33K (8 years). Now on a percentage basis, these cars held value better than many other makes/models, but 5 figures is still 5 figures.

Sometimes I think going to graduate school was the worst mistake (investment) of my life. I finished undergrad with an average amount of student loans (think low 5 digits). Instead, I got one more piece of paper to prove how much of a sucker I am, and it only cost me over $100k.

Sometimes I feel so much anger about the situation that I feel like writing a book to convince others the truth about higher education. The truth is, that unless you are going to business school to become an executive or some kind of business owner, you are going to school to be a moderately paid, modern-day slave. Yes, I used that word. SLAVE. Some may consider that hyperbole, but from the right perspective it's actually quite accurate. And if you have to take out loans to pay for college, then what you're really doing is becoming a debt slave. One day you are free... four years later, a debt slave.

The ONLY silver lining is that if you happen to be one of the lucky ones who gets a job in your chosen field (and you chose a field that pays at least moderately well), then there is a light at the end of the debt slave tunnel... and that light is simply a slightly higher income than those who didn't go to college.

It's kinda like marriage. 50% chance you get totally fucked, 50% chance you get only slightly fucked (less than 1% chance you hit it big).

In December 2017 a internet troll on a strip club message board recommended bitcoin as a strong buy. I think he was predicting 35K by 2018 years end. My life savings is still going to bounce back, right Dougster?

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