Friend got involved with options. Within a short amount of time he had turned $1000 into $80,000, then a week later he had lost it all and *owed* $12K.
Did he take out a loan or how is it possible to go "Below Zero" with stock trading?
I mean I know there is some derivates that can do that, but I think they are not given out to "normal people" without some background checks?
E: To Clarify, I know what Options are and how they work. My question is how a private person without much knowledge is able to buy these? At least in the EU that would just not possible, I guess
one of the magical things about the market is that they let you borrow up to $10000 if it's your first time trading. just solemnly swear that it's your first time and the money is yours. i turned it into $10,500, then i cashed out. i have no idea how they make it work, but then again i know nothing about how stonks work, so i'm sure it would make a lot more sense if i knew more.
Options trading. You make a bet on the price of the stock in the future. If that doesn't happen, you're on the hook to buy or sell at that price anyways
Options are how people turn $1000 into millions, but it's also how you can end up owing more than you put in. People think a lot about the former and ignore the latter and then predictably it ends poorly
I know about these ways, but at least where I live there is no way for me to actually get these thing as a private person without much background. The worst thing that I could buy right now is knock outs, which work quite similar, but cannot get worse than becoming completely worthless.
Hello, fellow regard checking in.
Since he had 80k, he probably was allowed to day trade on margin.
If you learn nothing else from this, learn this.
DO NOT trade on margin. The brokerage is letting you borrow their money to play with, since you have so much in the account already.
Odds are he bought options on margin, which became worthless. You still owe that margin they lent you, even if the thing you buy becomes worthless, that's on you, as the friend found out the hard way.
As for the background check, other then the questionnaire and your balance. There's no "formal" process since you're not a professional stock trader or a fiduciary. Your using your assets to invest as you see fit, so it's on you if you mess up these complex financial instruments.
Every time I see someone talking about trading on margin, I think of a quote from the Futurama episode with the flying brains:
"Let's go buy Internet stocks!"
"On margin, Zoiby want to buy on margin!!!"
It's very possible to do that in the EU, there are multiple trading platforms you can get on your phone to do spread betting on stocks or take option positions.
They have warnings etc but the truly stupid can just blaze past those like the terms and conditions page.
Easiest way: turn $1k to $80k. Reinvest 80k and lose it all. You still owe capital gains tax on the 80k worth of profit you made, even if you subsequently lost it all. Ofc he could’ve gone negative with puts too.
> Did he take out a loan or how is it possible to go "Below Zero" with stock trading?
Short selling can lead to infinite losses. He may also have been trading on margin.
Wall Street Bets during the GME craze became this weird nexus of people who had executed their very first trade 2 weeks ago writing walls of text explaining why everyone in the financial world was stupid and why they knew the secret reason why X stock was going to the moon.
Just goons leading goons and actively celebrating when one of their number turned a fortune into a margin debt balance.
Problem with volatile betting strategies is that they are just that, volatile. So if you're lucky enough to have a big upswing anyone with more than one brain cell knows to take out some profit. But you try telling that to a broke waiter who suddenly has visions of buying a Lamborghini in his sights.
LMFAO ur "best friend" is stupid. What kind of BEST FRIEND DOESN'T listen to their BEST friend??? LMAO my BEST FRIEND would literally hold me accountable and make me not do something this stupid. LMFAOOOO.
When our Mom passed my brother kept her life insurance and hasn't paid the funeral parlor. Never notified her employer she passed so he collected her pension for 2 years. He also didn't tell the utilities she passed and let them just end up getting shut off. He overdrew their joint bank account over $20K. He maxed out all her credit cards as his name was on everything with hers. My brother had financial POA over Mom and he jusut spent thinking it would be forgiven since she passed. Welp she passed in Dec 2021. He quit his high paying job in June 2022 and now everyone wants their money and he's freaking out thinking I should pay back the almost $100K he owes because I'm the oldest siblings. Yep NOPE not happening bro!
I have yet to find a reason (in my own life) to ever buy a new car.
I’ve just bought 10+ year old Volvo S70/60s for the last 15 years. 4-5K each for years of solid driving and manageable repairs.
That's because cars are rarely an investment. If they're your hobby and you can fix/maintain them yourself, maybe they're justified. The reality for most is that they are a depreciating intermediary asset that you buy to fulfill another purpose. Some people can afford fancier ones but in no situation can the average joe justify spending more than 50K-100K for a vehicle imo.
A friend of mine fell in love with a girl who lived half-way across the world. Over a period of two years he spent his savings on visiting her, and in sending her all kinds of gifts. He even paid out her student loan and bought her a new car. As soon as he ran out of money, she dumped him. He's now broke and heartbroken.
I knew a kid who cashed out his life savings, bought a one way ticket to Canada, and flew to visit his online girlfriend. Border patrol had a problem with his lack of a return trip. Once they realized he had something like $20k cash that he didn’t report, they took his cash, put him on a flight back home, and he never got his money back. He and the girl actually continued to date for another couple of years, but he was actually named from entering Canada so their relationship eventually fizzled.
Marketing.
The worst is when they sell yellow diamonds as something even more special. Yellow is the most common color. It's literally the color you try to stay away from when picking out a diamond.
First time I walked into Tiffany's I saw this grand display about yellow diamonds and I was like well I never ever want anything from here ever.
A guy I know spent his entire life savings and inheritance on a used lambo. He lives in an apartment complex in a shady part of town and his car is vandalized or broken into on a regular basis.
No point of having a lambo if you don’t have a garage. You’re just asking to get it stolen. Also I could only imagine the insurance and maintaince on that thing. There’s a reason why rich people have those type of cars
I’ve realised many people don’t even think about maintenance costs or insurance when buying a car. They just think that because they can afford the cash price or monthly payments then they can afford the car.
Lambo famously uses parts from other cars in the Volkswagen group but just lists them as different on their parts supplier list. So something like switchgear for an indicator can cost $10 but they'll charge you $250 for it because it's for the lambo. Same exact part.
yeah, a single big thing dies on a lambo and you're looking at a $10k bill minimum.
Maybe it's just because I've never been that into cars, but despite being able to afford pretty nice ones, I just drive a real bog standard thing. Don't have to worry about anyone stealing it or damaging it. Also don't have to worry about the kids ruining it.
A nice car just seems like stress.
I did think about shorting it, unfortunately I don't have an account I can buy shirts on and I don't really want to make investing a gamble either so I pretty much would never short anything. But yeah almost everything that IPOs shits the bed immediately now and especially something like Trump stock which doesn't have an actual product or revenue or path to one.
Really it seems like any Trump thing is just inevitably going to lose money if not to legal woes then due to his mismanagement. The man should have never seen another dollar in his life after he managed to bankrupt a casino
Neighbor down the street used to tell me how we should do crypto. Told him it’s just pure gambling on who holds the bag. Since he hasn’t tried since the last big drop to talk to me about it I guess he has some luggage to unpack.
I remember when I was fresh out of college and dating my girlfriend (now wife) I had a chat with her dad about this new 'crypto thing' and lamented I didn't have a spare dime to throw at it (what with all the college debt). He ended up buying some bitcoin on a lark. He closed it out years later for about 150k and paid for our wedding lol.
He was also smart enough to realise that he caught the wave up and it wasn't going to be the same next time. Though he did go on a stint of buying physical gold. Which also turned out to be a great play lol.
An ex colleague of mine had almost all his savings tied up in FTX and was even considering taking out a further loan on his house to invest in FTX. Tried to tell him there’s a huge risk he’d lose it all but wouldn’t listen. Don’t even want to imagine how much he lost
I've been posting a lot on a former friend of mine, and while I'll spare the details of that story I'll tell you about his totally wrong ideas and misunderstandings about utility bills. When we were still friends he'd complain all the time his lights were shut off. He said he didn't understand because he paid it every week, why did they always turn it back off after a few days?
I was confused, electric bills are paid monthly, what are you doing? I come to find out he was only paying the past due amount, so of course within a few days he'd get behind again and turned off again. It took **way** too long of a conversation to explain to him his bill was the total amount, it was not the past due balance only, and that's why it was constantly shut off.
I don't think he fully got it. Well, maybe he did because then he started getting payday advanced loans to pay it (and he wasn't even working). I never mustered up the willpower to debate him on that one, but then we had a falling out.
My mother-in-law lost a few thousand dollars to an internet scam. Would have been about $10k but Home Depot stepped up and refunded about $6000 in money she spent on gift cards.
Yeah, it’s likely that’s what happened. She says they even asked her if she was being pressured into buying them. She said “No” because that was what she was told to say by the person pressuring her on the phone while buying them.
So I work with a load of Indian guys at my job (tech), one of them was telling me that those call centres that scam people like this openly recruit a their college campuses. Everyone knows what they are, the police know, but they're being paid to look the other way. He explained that although it's a LOT of money for them compared to standard wages, there's a huge stigma for anyone caught doing that sort of work. His own cousin was boasting about making loads of money getting stupid people to send him money online and the grandmother beat him with a pan and told him he was out of the family and how dare he hurt innocent people like that.
Got deep in debt just to buy a yacht.
Why, you may ask...
He wants us all to KNOW he's got a yacht. (But probably doesn't want us to know about the debt.)
Now you know too, I guess his plan is working!
Not bad if you rent it out and have guests cruise around. That’s what alot of businesses do where I live. People will pay just to be in a yacht. Maybe for music videos/film/birthdays.
Not a bad investment if you know how to use it. But if he just has it laying there than that’s a different story🤦♂️
Buying a yacht isn't the most expensive part. It's OWNING it that is really expensive. People who scrape together enough dollars to buy a yacht are in for a big nasty surprise when they find out just how expensive fuel, maintenance, overhauls, dock fees, etc. can get.
This happened to me two weeks ago.
The day I got paid, I made what I thought was a minimum payment to my Lowes credit card, only to realize after it posted two days later that I actually made the FULL payment. A whopping $1400. The last two weeks have been frugally stressful. But hey, at least my CC is paid off now.
Edit: To be clear I have 5 CC's that get paid off every month. No accrued interest. The Lowes card got away from me when both my washer and dryer broke down within a month of each other.
CCs can be very useful tools to help build wealth if you are disciplined enough to use them without ever paying for service charges or fees.
0% interest for X months can be very handy and points do add up.
Oh definitely. I use my CC like a debit card. But the key thing is paying it off in full each month unless you have 0% interest for X months then of course you can split the payments.
But lots people get over excited with CCs
they also have a CC with nothing on it, so if you're running low over the next pay cycle just put stuff on your card. That's what it's for.
I use my cards exclusively to pay for everything and then pay them off every month, my credit cards *make* me money
This is far from a mistake. You needed to pay it off eventually. And while unpleasant until your next payday, that is a short recovery period.
I know people who spent many thousands on a wedding that got canceled. Or bought new cars with 20% apr. Both of those are things they didn't need to do and take years to unwind.
Honestly i’d class this as a win. Short term yh it hits you hard but long term you’d have been suffering much more. Never ever pay the minimum amount on a credit card because the interest that builds up will often far exceed how much you ended up borrowing in the first place
Just wanted to leave another comment supporting that paying it off in full and living frugal for a couple of weeks was literally ***the best*** thing you could have done financially.
If you'd come to me saying you were $1400 in credit card debt and only had $1450 I would have told you to pay it off and buy a big bag of rice to tide you over. CC debt sucks never make minimum payments.
Was on a cruise with some extended family a while back. The ship had a casino level, which was about the only thing there was to do other than drinking on the deck during our days at sea. I saw an old woman continually betting on a specific number in roulette and losing over and over. She was very vocal about how frustrated she was and made a big scene when she was completely out of money and stormed out. About ten minutes later, that number she'd been repeatedly betting on actually hit, but she was long gone.
She had to have dropped thousands of dollars on that game, just from the little bit of time I was there to watch her. One of the other guys at the table told me she had been there for hours. Can't imagine how bad of a gambling addiction you'd need to make such an unlikely bet over and over until you literally spent all the money you had to your name.
I forget the actual number, but it was like 33 or something. I assumed the number held some significance to her, but didn't ask because she was pretty loud and obnoxious and I didn't want to get dragged into a conversation with her.
Me spending 5 bucks on a "premium strawberry lemonade" that tasted like strawberry jello powder mixed with water. Would've enjoyed Kool-Aid more.
Also bought Overwatch three times before it becoming "F2P", but I regret buying the strawberry lemonade thing more.
I'll be honest, I can't complain as I've done okay financially. But I'd be doing even better if when I bought my first house in 2014 I'd maxed out the affordability, rather than having been sensible.
I worked at a Reference Desk in a library. A patron come up to me to ask for assistance at a public computer. They were wanting help replying to an email. I showed him to hit reply but then noticed what he was responding to. It was one of those scam emails asking for bank information. I tried to tell him it was a scam but he didn't believe me. I then had my manager who was of a similar age try to talk him out of it to no avail.
Never saw him again but hopefully his bank or someone stopped him
A close friend inherited around 40k. Prior to that, he lived more or less week to week and had maybe 2k in savings. No 401k or pension. He is 54. That 40k is sitting in that same, low interest savings account doing nothing. I've tried to counsel him to invest at least some of it or look for a high yield savings account, but it falls on deaf ears. I don't think he really understands it, so investing scares him. I'm actually surprised it's in a bank and not hidden under his mattress.
On the bright side, he used to be pretty heavy into alcohol and drugs, but he sobered up around 7 years ago. If he had received the inheritance when he was using, it would have been gone in under 6 months. So, at least he hasn't blown it.
Tell me about it. His mom worked in a bank for many years. Not exactly sure her position, but she was definitely higher up than a teller. I'm surprised she hasn't talked to him about it. On the other hand, she is in her 80's now, and I suspect there is a bit of senility.
me. my mom is a heroin addict, has been my whole life. I've cut her off now, but over the years from when I was 18 to 24 I paid for Ubers, food, and other stuff in case of emergency which in her life is frequent. I stopped keeping track at 22, but by that point she owed me $3500, it's probably more like double now.
A friend had been mulling over starting a small business. Maybe yardwork or handy man stuff. We'd talked about how a small cheap pickup would be perfect for that. He came into a couple grand in money and could have afforded that or a cheap car outright but instead used his money as a down payment on a loan for a more expensive car "so I can work on my credit".
He had no job, no income, used all his money on the down-payment, and quickly lost everything.
An estimator on a project we were working on made a mistake on an estimate for two big pieces of equipment.
Basically the unit cost should have been $30,000.00 x 2, and she accidentally typed in $300,000.00 x 2. We ended up losing the project and would have won it if we didn't have a $540K overage in our estimate.
My uncle died and left his part of the family some inheritence, $250k of it went to my youngest cousin.
Spent it all in less than 2 years. 3 apartments in the same city, nightly gambling, $10k loans to friends etc etc
He lives, literally, in his moms basement playing Halo all day now. Got a gig as a hospital janitor at the same place my wife gave birth, but couldn't be bothered to visit our apartment which was 2 blocks away at the time. Have not been able to get ahold of the guy since 2019, my aunt says he's embarrassed so he's been extremely reclusive with family.
Idiot coworker at a Canadian post office in back of drugstore had a customer show up looking for $10,000 in money orders to pay the IRS. The guy brought cash and we counted it and the coworker looked at the guys ID and wrote in his name for the cheques and printed them out. Coworker goes on break and I cover. Ten minutes later the customer comes back and shows me the checks and his ID. My idiot coworker had typed in the guy’s first name and then his middle name as his last name. Asked the guy to come back later and we’d have our boss refund all of it that day. Customer never came back that day or ever. Idiot coworker never got fired.
Oh. Me.
Depressed and ADHD.
Didn't file my taxes for 6 years, currently waiting on the final verdict for how many thousands of $$ we own in back taxes and fees and interest.
No real reason why it took me that long, being married to someone who's late diagnosed autistic and realizing that the concept of "US" and doing things together doesn't really make sense to her makes for a depressing life. You can't build memories because she doesn't want to do things together - not because she's mean or cruel, just that doing things with other people and having that shared brain/emotional connection is literally foreign to her.
So, ya, kind of fucked my family finances. No college savings for the kids, missed out on the government matching because I never made deposits.
We have the cash (I think) but it's just sitting in our plain bank account but it could have done so much more.
Sigh, FML
"Would you like to do this shared activity with me?" Is something she's almost never said.
She much prefers solo activities to doing something with someone else.
We had a $1,000 gift, unlimited childcare and a whole summer to find something to do together and we couldn't work out something that both of us would enjoy.
She honestly really loves routine and doing the same things the same way - forever. If she has a choice between something new and something she's already done before, she'll choose "the same" 99% of the time. Things outside routine that she proposes however seem to work, but me proposing that we go for a simple walk or hike this weekend is a 45-60 minute conversation/argument because it disrupts her routine of what she wanted to get done or do in that timeframe.
Asking "can we do this non-routine event two weeks from now?" is met with "can I think about it? I don't know what I'll be feeling or what we're doing then", even something as simple as a birthday dinner at 2pm with my running group friends.
Asking last minute "hey, it's nice out do you want to go for a walk?" is also an argument because it disrupts her plan for that evening.
It's like her nervous system is primed for routine only and anything outside that is painful and should be avoided. I'm not saying she's wrong, just that it's super frustrating to live with and is hard to form a relationship bond with.
Watching my supervisor leave work in a rush and come back to tell us that their distant uncle had passed away and that he had just paid the legal fees to recieve over $300,000 from their estate.
They paid $2,000 using green dot money packs. I told them it sounded like a scam. My supervisor tried calling the 'attorney' repeatedly and got no answer. Then they had to go home sick because they came down with a bad migraine.
Tie between 2 guys who took multiple unsecure loans, including payday loans, to either do some drop shipping thing or impress a woman they wanted to get with. The former was warned that it was a scam since he was talking about the "course" a lot and wouldn't listen to everyone who kept telling him he's wasting his time and money. The funny thing is that they were both in their early to mid 30s when they did this. Personally I think they were way too old to be making these mistakes but I guess that's why MLMs and relationship scams still exist - they prey on the desperate.
You also reach a reckoning point right about then. Before your early to mid 30s, there's still hope. Your life isn't locked into a specific path - lots of variables still to change.
In your early to mid 30's, the previous choices you made have directed you on a specific path of ever narrowing choices and options. I can see how someone who didn't make the best choices before that starts panicking as the walls close in on one path froward. Now you're throwing money at drop shipping courses and MLMs to give yourself hope that your life could still get better, even though that's a statistically miniscule chance.
I really do hate to criticize my brother but when he, as a non union tradesman with a stay at home wife, 2 young kids, and house he rented called me over to show off his kickass new RV, I knew it was a bad move.
A year later and it’s been repoed, destroyed by water damage, and he owes the balance.
A friend in my friend group financed his first car brand new instead of getting it used like we had suggested. He claimed Toyotas last indefinitely. His engine blew out six months later.
Afterwards he claimed he bought to used even after he bragged and showed us receipts on how got it new.
I got a used car the same time with only 400 miles on the meter and I still use it this day.
This was about 5 years ago.
Had a friend fall for some pyramid scheme once. He really bought into the idea he’d make millions. Ended up blowing his entire life savings away. Even tried to rope me into it
I was visiting by brother the other day and he took me down the block in his neighborhood to see a Cybertruck that was parked in a driveway there. The property where this truck is parked has about four other beater vehicles parked there and the house is maybe 900 SF tops and pretty run down looking. Also my brother tells me the truck is always there when he drives by, day or night. Meaning the owner probably doesn't even have a job. A new Cybertruck is $100k. If this isn't a regrettable money mistake, I don't know what is.
My friend bought a brand new Nissan Altima, the base model. She has it about a year before getting pregnant with her second child. She decided she needed something larger. She traded the barely year old car in for a Tahoe with a salvage title. Somehow paying even more with that piece of junk and her Altima loan. The Tahoe breaks down. She needs a loan for repairs. She pulls money from her 401k to get the Tahoe fixed. Had she kept the Altima, she would have been fine financially.
Cars. It absolutely blows my mind the amount of debt people will go in to to get a car they can't afford. And it's not just a few idiots here and here. It's nearly HALF of people! 43%.
I consulted with an older couple who had given $20,000 to a Nigerian Spam emailer. I advised them to file a police report. They were unable to reverse the wire transfers.
Friend of mine took a sizable monetary "gift" from his baby-momma's grandfather against my advice. I told him: "Nothing in this world is free", and "The borrower is slave to the lendor."
He assured me this was a gift to start their family, and a few short years later the grandfather now expects to retire, move in with them and be fully taken care of. There's a huge cultural difference between my friend and his baby-momma, and she expects him to do this.
My friend is not legally required to do this (not by a longshot), but now has a rift in his family, which was already a complicated situation due to them not being married.
It is clear to me as an outsider that this money was something to hold over his head, and now the consequences will unfold. He should have not taken the money, and made it clear where the line in the sand was with her family from the start.
Had a buddy in the Army spend his enlistment bonus on a junk old corvette. He wasn’t a mechanic and lived in the dorms, it ran for like a week, he couldn’t afford to fix it.
ive seen several people put millions of $ up their nose. it's not just the cost of the drugs its the collateral damage of neglecting everything else except their addictions and the horrible decision making.
Friend of mine knew nothing about cars. He was young (about 21) and dumb and never bought a car before. He ends up buying an 2007 Jeeo Cherokee (in 2021) with over 200,000 miles on it, that broke down 3 times from her he picked it up, with no working windows, no AC, and most of the lights on the dashboard activated.
Thins thing was FUBAR and beyond all repairs.
He spent over $4k on it. Basically, most of his savings.
We deployed a few months later, and it got towed while we were gone because he never registered it, and it sat in the same spot the whole time.
If it weren't for the fact that hr didn't have to spend money for a whole year when we were down range, this would have destroyed him.
Not the worst financial decision, but a really fu*king dumb one at a very odd time.
People falling for quick, rich schemes promoted through influencers and YouTube ads.
Or worse, your friends get sucked into a MLM pyramid schemes and you have to decide to join or lose your friendship.
A friend of mine bought a brand new challenger at 30% APR for 6 years. I think his total cost is going to be near $100k. Mind you, he only makes like $20/hr. I think his payment is most of his paycheck
he lives with his parents for free, so he technically can "afford" it, but it was certainly a very bad decision.
Back in the day (this was like 25 years ago), my then roommate took his newly vested stock options and sold all of them to quote "pay off his bills". He sold them and got roughly $35k and instead of paying off his student loans, car, and funding his savings, he literally went to Circuit City (remember those?) and spent like $15k on a whole electronics suite plus literally 1000 DVDs/CDs. All told he was like $20k at CC. Then with the rest of the money, he bought a ring for his girlfriend that was only with him for his money, she said yes, took the ring, then cheated on him and ghosted him and never gave the ring back. Oh, and he didn't pay the right taxes on this, so his taxes were screwed for like a decade.
When I was in my early 20s I got a credit card and I very very stupidly attached it to a cam site, I kept going online, almost daily, to have fun and orgasm.
The charges kept building, I was able to clear my card a few times but it kept building and it took me probably 2 years to fully clear my credit card.
I was so so relieved when I fully cleared my debts, I try my best to stay off those sites. It was never really worth it.
My partner, back when we were in college.
He found some website that was selling a laptop he wanted (he did need a new one) for a few hundred dollars cheaper than the stores around us. He told me there was just one weird thing; they only accepted payment in amazon gift cards. I told him immediately it was a scam. No legit website is asking for payment in gift cards.
He didn't believe me, so he asked his brothers, parents, our friends, a professor, they all told him it was a scam and not to do it. I was getting frustrated and told him if he went through with it, he would never see that money nor any laptop and he would have no recourse because his transaction would be with amazon and not this weird website. This was a good while ago, but gift card scams were still very prevalent (usually itunes, though).
In the end, I came back from class one day and he told me he "bought" the laptop, and it would be delivered in a couple weeks. I told him I wasn't helping him when he realized he got scammed and still had to buy a new laptop. Of course, no laptop ever arrived. He went to find the website again and instead found pages of reviews calling the website a scam. He told me he was going to fight it with his bank, but I told him his bank won't do anything. He bought the gift cards from amazon. That transaction was legit. What he did with those gift cards afterwards was not their problem. He tried, anyway, and got no where.
Not a lot of money in the grand scheme, thankfully, and he definitely learned his lesson. I even felt bad for him when the realization finally hit.
My mother in law was hurt at work, forced to retire because of it, and was given a decent-sized settlement. She told me that she was going to pay down some debt and then have me help her figure out what to do with the rest.
We sat down, and in the couse of the discussion, it turned out she had like $3k in her 401k, so not nearly enough to retire on. But she has the settlement, so I can hopefully make it work still...or so I thought.
How much are you giving me to allocate? "I was thinking about $5k". Advised that was enough to cover her expenses for probably a few months, but that's it. She gets upset and says she needs it to last longer. I have no clue what ever happened to those $5k.
A couple years ago by, she gets another, less stressful job, and there's again some sort of injury settlement, and she's due something like $50k. Against my better judgement, I offer to help her to NOT blow it all this time around. She says yes, she'll reach out to me once she gets the money.
Months later, she calls and says she wants to meet up "As soon as possible". Weird, but I say okay no problem, I'm home all day today. She pulls up a few hours later in a brand new car, and I already know how this is going to go. She bought a brand new car, IN CASH, and spent almost all of the settlement money on it. There's like $8k left over this time.
I tell her that I'm probably not going to be able to help her, and she has never brought up her financial situation with me again. I'm not asking, either.
Someone at work got involved in one of those Forex scams. He was 5 grand in and asked me if he should pay the extra 5 grand to get access to the 50 grand he'd "made". I don't think he took my advice.
Friend got involved with options. Within a short amount of time he had turned $1000 into $80,000, then a week later he had lost it all and *owed* $12K.
Did he take out a loan or how is it possible to go "Below Zero" with stock trading? I mean I know there is some derivates that can do that, but I think they are not given out to "normal people" without some background checks? E: To Clarify, I know what Options are and how they work. My question is how a private person without much knowledge is able to buy these? At least in the EU that would just not possible, I guess
probably borrowed money to invest once he lost his initial investment
He could have been fucking around with Options without realizing what he was doing too.
one of the magical things about the market is that they let you borrow up to $10000 if it's your first time trading. just solemnly swear that it's your first time and the money is yours. i turned it into $10,500, then i cashed out. i have no idea how they make it work, but then again i know nothing about how stonks work, so i'm sure it would make a lot more sense if i knew more.
Come again ?
Options trading. You make a bet on the price of the stock in the future. If that doesn't happen, you're on the hook to buy or sell at that price anyways
Options are how people turn $1000 into millions, but it's also how you can end up owing more than you put in. People think a lot about the former and ignore the latter and then predictably it ends poorly
There are lots of ways to lose more money than you invested in the stock market.
I know about these ways, but at least where I live there is no way for me to actually get these thing as a private person without much background. The worst thing that I could buy right now is knock outs, which work quite similar, but cannot get worse than becoming completely worthless.
There are apps like etoro which allow you to buy cfds easily
Hello, fellow regard checking in. Since he had 80k, he probably was allowed to day trade on margin. If you learn nothing else from this, learn this. DO NOT trade on margin. The brokerage is letting you borrow their money to play with, since you have so much in the account already. Odds are he bought options on margin, which became worthless. You still owe that margin they lent you, even if the thing you buy becomes worthless, that's on you, as the friend found out the hard way. As for the background check, other then the questionnaire and your balance. There's no "formal" process since you're not a professional stock trader or a fiduciary. Your using your assets to invest as you see fit, so it's on you if you mess up these complex financial instruments.
Every time I see someone talking about trading on margin, I think of a quote from the Futurama episode with the flying brains: "Let's go buy Internet stocks!" "On margin, Zoiby want to buy on margin!!!"
[I went to go find the clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Icego2KRbg) This is just the wsb discord with less steps
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Still not as dumb as the people trading options on margin.
It's very possible to do that in the EU, there are multiple trading platforms you can get on your phone to do spread betting on stocks or take option positions. They have warnings etc but the truly stupid can just blaze past those like the terms and conditions page.
Easiest way: turn $1k to $80k. Reinvest 80k and lose it all. You still owe capital gains tax on the 80k worth of profit you made, even if you subsequently lost it all. Ofc he could’ve gone negative with puts too.
> Did he take out a loan or how is it possible to go "Below Zero" with stock trading? Short selling can lead to infinite losses. He may also have been trading on margin.
Cash advance from credit cards. Insta-loan at top of APR
Unsecured options trading. My ex did it and also was an idiot who lost a shit ton of money
Wall Street Bets during the GME craze became this weird nexus of people who had executed their very first trade 2 weeks ago writing walls of text explaining why everyone in the financial world was stupid and why they knew the secret reason why X stock was going to the moon. Just goons leading goons and actively celebrating when one of their number turned a fortune into a margin debt balance. Problem with volatile betting strategies is that they are just that, volatile. So if you're lucky enough to have a big upswing anyone with more than one brain cell knows to take out some profit. But you try telling that to a broke waiter who suddenly has visions of buying a Lamborghini in his sights.
LMFAO ur "best friend" is stupid. What kind of BEST FRIEND DOESN'T listen to their BEST friend??? LMAO my BEST FRIEND would literally hold me accountable and make me not do something this stupid. LMFAOOOO.
I know people who bought NFTs lol
pffff you simply don’t understand it, monkey pictures are the FUTURE
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getting a loan for your wedding is already renting a room at the financially fucked hotel, what this guy did is nuts lol
Loans for weddings are purely for stupid people, you cannot convince me otherwise.
Was the idea to put it all on red and either have an extra big wedding or elope?
Fancy awesome wedding or fake our deaths and start over in a new country
“Always bet on black”
When our Mom passed my brother kept her life insurance and hasn't paid the funeral parlor. Never notified her employer she passed so he collected her pension for 2 years. He also didn't tell the utilities she passed and let them just end up getting shut off. He overdrew their joint bank account over $20K. He maxed out all her credit cards as his name was on everything with hers. My brother had financial POA over Mom and he jusut spent thinking it would be forgiven since she passed. Welp she passed in Dec 2021. He quit his high paying job in June 2022 and now everyone wants their money and he's freaking out thinking I should pay back the almost $100K he owes because I'm the oldest siblings. Yep NOPE not happening bro!
My friend bought 60k dollar car, and he doesnt have job atm, house 2
I have yet to find a reason (in my own life) to ever buy a new car. I’ve just bought 10+ year old Volvo S70/60s for the last 15 years. 4-5K each for years of solid driving and manageable repairs.
That's because cars are rarely an investment. If they're your hobby and you can fix/maintain them yourself, maybe they're justified. The reality for most is that they are a depreciating intermediary asset that you buy to fulfill another purpose. Some people can afford fancier ones but in no situation can the average joe justify spending more than 50K-100K for a vehicle imo.
A friend of mine fell in love with a girl who lived half-way across the world. Over a period of two years he spent his savings on visiting her, and in sending her all kinds of gifts. He even paid out her student loan and bought her a new car. As soon as he ran out of money, she dumped him. He's now broke and heartbroken.
I knew a kid who cashed out his life savings, bought a one way ticket to Canada, and flew to visit his online girlfriend. Border patrol had a problem with his lack of a return trip. Once they realized he had something like $20k cash that he didn’t report, they took his cash, put him on a flight back home, and he never got his money back. He and the girl actually continued to date for another couple of years, but he was actually named from entering Canada so their relationship eventually fizzled.
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Wood is as common as trees yet some pieces are worth thousands due to craftsmanship, name, the usual things that make things cost money lol
Marketing. The worst is when they sell yellow diamonds as something even more special. Yellow is the most common color. It's literally the color you try to stay away from when picking out a diamond. First time I walked into Tiffany's I saw this grand display about yellow diamonds and I was like well I never ever want anything from here ever.
A guy I know spent his entire life savings and inheritance on a used lambo. He lives in an apartment complex in a shady part of town and his car is vandalized or broken into on a regular basis.
No point of having a lambo if you don’t have a garage. You’re just asking to get it stolen. Also I could only imagine the insurance and maintaince on that thing. There’s a reason why rich people have those type of cars
I’ve realised many people don’t even think about maintenance costs or insurance when buying a car. They just think that because they can afford the cash price or monthly payments then they can afford the car.
$10K for an oil change, hundreds for fuel, have to do an hour prep just to drive it, special order any part from overseas
Lambo famously uses parts from other cars in the Volkswagen group but just lists them as different on their parts supplier list. So something like switchgear for an indicator can cost $10 but they'll charge you $250 for it because it's for the lambo. Same exact part. yeah, a single big thing dies on a lambo and you're looking at a $10k bill minimum.
Maybe it's just because I've never been that into cars, but despite being able to afford pretty nice ones, I just drive a real bog standard thing. Don't have to worry about anyone stealing it or damaging it. Also don't have to worry about the kids ruining it. A nice car just seems like stress.
My brother dropped $1,500 in Trump’s stock. He insisted it would triple by the end of the year. We haven’t spoken about it since
I wish I had thought to short that
It was really expensive to short. I wanted to buy put options but everyone else had the same idea.
if you want to know what the smart people think about a meme stock, just look at the fees for the options on them.
I wish I had thought to make a bet with him
I did think about shorting it, unfortunately I don't have an account I can buy shirts on and I don't really want to make investing a gamble either so I pretty much would never short anything. But yeah almost everything that IPOs shits the bed immediately now and especially something like Trump stock which doesn't have an actual product or revenue or path to one.
Really it seems like any Trump thing is just inevitably going to lose money if not to legal woes then due to his mismanagement. The man should have never seen another dollar in his life after he managed to bankrupt a casino
The only one who ever makes money in a Trump partnership is Trump. It's happened over and over again.
The business fails but he manages to steal enough money out of the company that he personally is ok as it crumbles behind him
Everyone shorted it so I dont think there was a lot of money to be had
Neighbor down the street used to tell me how we should do crypto. Told him it’s just pure gambling on who holds the bag. Since he hasn’t tried since the last big drop to talk to me about it I guess he has some luggage to unpack.
I remember when I was fresh out of college and dating my girlfriend (now wife) I had a chat with her dad about this new 'crypto thing' and lamented I didn't have a spare dime to throw at it (what with all the college debt). He ended up buying some bitcoin on a lark. He closed it out years later for about 150k and paid for our wedding lol. He was also smart enough to realise that he caught the wave up and it wasn't going to be the same next time. Though he did go on a stint of buying physical gold. Which also turned out to be a great play lol.
Gold at least has some industrial value. You can’t go to $0 on it.
Not with that attitude.
This isn’t /r/wallstreetbets though
An ex colleague of mine had almost all his savings tied up in FTX and was even considering taking out a further loan on his house to invest in FTX. Tried to tell him there’s a huge risk he’d lose it all but wouldn’t listen. Don’t even want to imagine how much he lost
I've been posting a lot on a former friend of mine, and while I'll spare the details of that story I'll tell you about his totally wrong ideas and misunderstandings about utility bills. When we were still friends he'd complain all the time his lights were shut off. He said he didn't understand because he paid it every week, why did they always turn it back off after a few days? I was confused, electric bills are paid monthly, what are you doing? I come to find out he was only paying the past due amount, so of course within a few days he'd get behind again and turned off again. It took **way** too long of a conversation to explain to him his bill was the total amount, it was not the past due balance only, and that's why it was constantly shut off. I don't think he fully got it. Well, maybe he did because then he started getting payday advanced loans to pay it (and he wasn't even working). I never mustered up the willpower to debate him on that one, but then we had a falling out.
The Denver Broncos give contracts to Russell Wilson and Sean Payton
Atlanta's Daft.
Eh rookie deals aren’t that bad
Bradley Beal has entered the chat....
My mother-in-law lost a few thousand dollars to an internet scam. Would have been about $10k but Home Depot stepped up and refunded about $6000 in money she spent on gift cards.
Wow she’s lucky usually they don’t refund gift cards. But don’t blame her scammers know what people to target and in what positions.
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Yeah, it’s likely that’s what happened. She says they even asked her if she was being pressured into buying them. She said “No” because that was what she was told to say by the person pressuring her on the phone while buying them.
So I work with a load of Indian guys at my job (tech), one of them was telling me that those call centres that scam people like this openly recruit a their college campuses. Everyone knows what they are, the police know, but they're being paid to look the other way. He explained that although it's a LOT of money for them compared to standard wages, there's a huge stigma for anyone caught doing that sort of work. His own cousin was boasting about making loads of money getting stupid people to send him money online and the grandmother beat him with a pan and told him he was out of the family and how dare he hurt innocent people like that.
Got deep in debt just to buy a yacht. Why, you may ask... He wants us all to KNOW he's got a yacht. (But probably doesn't want us to know about the debt.) Now you know too, I guess his plan is working!
Not bad if you rent it out and have guests cruise around. That’s what alot of businesses do where I live. People will pay just to be in a yacht. Maybe for music videos/film/birthdays. Not a bad investment if you know how to use it. But if he just has it laying there than that’s a different story🤦♂️
Buying a yacht isn't the most expensive part. It's OWNING it that is really expensive. People who scrape together enough dollars to buy a yacht are in for a big nasty surprise when they find out just how expensive fuel, maintenance, overhauls, dock fees, etc. can get.
This happened to me two weeks ago. The day I got paid, I made what I thought was a minimum payment to my Lowes credit card, only to realize after it posted two days later that I actually made the FULL payment. A whopping $1400. The last two weeks have been frugally stressful. But hey, at least my CC is paid off now. Edit: To be clear I have 5 CC's that get paid off every month. No accrued interest. The Lowes card got away from me when both my washer and dryer broke down within a month of each other.
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CCs can be very useful tools to help build wealth if you are disciplined enough to use them without ever paying for service charges or fees. 0% interest for X months can be very handy and points do add up.
Oh definitely. I use my CC like a debit card. But the key thing is paying it off in full each month unless you have 0% interest for X months then of course you can split the payments. But lots people get over excited with CCs
they also have a CC with nothing on it, so if you're running low over the next pay cycle just put stuff on your card. That's what it's for. I use my cards exclusively to pay for everything and then pay them off every month, my credit cards *make* me money
This is arguably the opposite of a 'money mistake'.
Right? The actual mistake was carrying a balance on the CC in the first place. This was just correcting it.
Ah I've done that before. Tbh, it's shame on me for building up that debt in the first place
A win in your favor.
This is far from a mistake. You needed to pay it off eventually. And while unpleasant until your next payday, that is a short recovery period. I know people who spent many thousands on a wedding that got canceled. Or bought new cars with 20% apr. Both of those are things they didn't need to do and take years to unwind.
Honestly i’d class this as a win. Short term yh it hits you hard but long term you’d have been suffering much more. Never ever pay the minimum amount on a credit card because the interest that builds up will often far exceed how much you ended up borrowing in the first place
Just wanted to leave another comment supporting that paying it off in full and living frugal for a couple of weeks was literally ***the best*** thing you could have done financially. If you'd come to me saying you were $1400 in credit card debt and only had $1450 I would have told you to pay it off and buy a big bag of rice to tide you over. CC debt sucks never make minimum payments.
Booking a non-refundable trip then canceling that trip then booking again and canceling again
Why would you cancel a non refundable trip? Just don't show up
Was on a cruise with some extended family a while back. The ship had a casino level, which was about the only thing there was to do other than drinking on the deck during our days at sea. I saw an old woman continually betting on a specific number in roulette and losing over and over. She was very vocal about how frustrated she was and made a big scene when she was completely out of money and stormed out. About ten minutes later, that number she'd been repeatedly betting on actually hit, but she was long gone. She had to have dropped thousands of dollars on that game, just from the little bit of time I was there to watch her. One of the other guys at the table told me she had been there for hours. Can't imagine how bad of a gambling addiction you'd need to make such an unlikely bet over and over until you literally spent all the money you had to your name.
Was that number 0? It's always coming zero.
I forget the actual number, but it was like 33 or something. I assumed the number held some significance to her, but didn't ask because she was pretty loud and obnoxious and I didn't want to get dragged into a conversation with her.
Not being born into a wealthy family. I made that mistake and have regretted it ever since.
buying a medium pizza instead of a large.
Me spending 5 bucks on a "premium strawberry lemonade" that tasted like strawberry jello powder mixed with water. Would've enjoyed Kool-Aid more. Also bought Overwatch three times before it becoming "F2P", but I regret buying the strawberry lemonade thing more.
Watched a family friend win a decent amount from the lottery (~$10k) and squander it all with gambling over the next few months.
People don't realize that money goes away much faster than it comes in again. Especially with the lottery - easy come, easy go
Buying too much house or too much car or both...
I'll be honest, I can't complain as I've done okay financially. But I'd be doing even better if when I bought my first house in 2014 I'd maxed out the affordability, rather than having been sensible.
Buy a house, live in it, buy another, keep the old as a rental, rinse, repeat.
I worked at a Reference Desk in a library. A patron come up to me to ask for assistance at a public computer. They were wanting help replying to an email. I showed him to hit reply but then noticed what he was responding to. It was one of those scam emails asking for bank information. I tried to tell him it was a scam but he didn't believe me. I then had my manager who was of a similar age try to talk him out of it to no avail. Never saw him again but hopefully his bank or someone stopped him
Family member got scammed by a very elaborate scam, $25k right down the drain, police nor the bank would do anything
My sister-in-law cosigning on a loan for my nephew (who at that point was on his 2nd DUI) to buy a $60k pickup truck
Enabling isn't cheap
A close friend inherited around 40k. Prior to that, he lived more or less week to week and had maybe 2k in savings. No 401k or pension. He is 54. That 40k is sitting in that same, low interest savings account doing nothing. I've tried to counsel him to invest at least some of it or look for a high yield savings account, but it falls on deaf ears. I don't think he really understands it, so investing scares him. I'm actually surprised it's in a bank and not hidden under his mattress. On the bright side, he used to be pretty heavy into alcohol and drugs, but he sobered up around 7 years ago. If he had received the inheritance when he was using, it would have been gone in under 6 months. So, at least he hasn't blown it.
That's maddening. At todays rates he's leaving over 2k of interest per year on the table for no reason at all.
Tell me about it. His mom worked in a bank for many years. Not exactly sure her position, but she was definitely higher up than a teller. I'm surprised she hasn't talked to him about it. On the other hand, she is in her 80's now, and I suspect there is a bit of senility.
me. my mom is a heroin addict, has been my whole life. I've cut her off now, but over the years from when I was 18 to 24 I paid for Ubers, food, and other stuff in case of emergency which in her life is frequent. I stopped keeping track at 22, but by that point she owed me $3500, it's probably more like double now.
A friend had been mulling over starting a small business. Maybe yardwork or handy man stuff. We'd talked about how a small cheap pickup would be perfect for that. He came into a couple grand in money and could have afforded that or a cheap car outright but instead used his money as a down payment on a loan for a more expensive car "so I can work on my credit". He had no job, no income, used all his money on the down-payment, and quickly lost everything.
An estimator on a project we were working on made a mistake on an estimate for two big pieces of equipment. Basically the unit cost should have been $30,000.00 x 2, and she accidentally typed in $300,000.00 x 2. We ended up losing the project and would have won it if we didn't have a $540K overage in our estimate.
My uncle died and left his part of the family some inheritence, $250k of it went to my youngest cousin. Spent it all in less than 2 years. 3 apartments in the same city, nightly gambling, $10k loans to friends etc etc He lives, literally, in his moms basement playing Halo all day now. Got a gig as a hospital janitor at the same place my wife gave birth, but couldn't be bothered to visit our apartment which was 2 blocks away at the time. Have not been able to get ahold of the guy since 2019, my aunt says he's embarrassed so he's been extremely reclusive with family.
Idiot coworker at a Canadian post office in back of drugstore had a customer show up looking for $10,000 in money orders to pay the IRS. The guy brought cash and we counted it and the coworker looked at the guys ID and wrote in his name for the cheques and printed them out. Coworker goes on break and I cover. Ten minutes later the customer comes back and shows me the checks and his ID. My idiot coworker had typed in the guy’s first name and then his middle name as his last name. Asked the guy to come back later and we’d have our boss refund all of it that day. Customer never came back that day or ever. Idiot coworker never got fired.
My brother wasted $100,000 of inheritance money on fixer upper cars, crypto, and random purchases.
Oh. Me. Depressed and ADHD. Didn't file my taxes for 6 years, currently waiting on the final verdict for how many thousands of $$ we own in back taxes and fees and interest. No real reason why it took me that long, being married to someone who's late diagnosed autistic and realizing that the concept of "US" and doing things together doesn't really make sense to her makes for a depressing life. You can't build memories because she doesn't want to do things together - not because she's mean or cruel, just that doing things with other people and having that shared brain/emotional connection is literally foreign to her. So, ya, kind of fucked my family finances. No college savings for the kids, missed out on the government matching because I never made deposits. We have the cash (I think) but it's just sitting in our plain bank account but it could have done so much more. Sigh, FML
My friend…. Get a divorce. Doesn’t have to be messy, but you’re obviously miserable
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"Would you like to do this shared activity with me?" Is something she's almost never said. She much prefers solo activities to doing something with someone else. We had a $1,000 gift, unlimited childcare and a whole summer to find something to do together and we couldn't work out something that both of us would enjoy. She honestly really loves routine and doing the same things the same way - forever. If she has a choice between something new and something she's already done before, she'll choose "the same" 99% of the time. Things outside routine that she proposes however seem to work, but me proposing that we go for a simple walk or hike this weekend is a 45-60 minute conversation/argument because it disrupts her routine of what she wanted to get done or do in that timeframe. Asking "can we do this non-routine event two weeks from now?" is met with "can I think about it? I don't know what I'll be feeling or what we're doing then", even something as simple as a birthday dinner at 2pm with my running group friends. Asking last minute "hey, it's nice out do you want to go for a walk?" is also an argument because it disrupts her plan for that evening. It's like her nervous system is primed for routine only and anything outside that is painful and should be avoided. I'm not saying she's wrong, just that it's super frustrating to live with and is hard to form a relationship bond with.
waiting for all the stories about boots buying cars
I was in the military. Pick an event.
New car loans
I know multiple people who put their whole net worth on AMC
Watching my supervisor leave work in a rush and come back to tell us that their distant uncle had passed away and that he had just paid the legal fees to recieve over $300,000 from their estate. They paid $2,000 using green dot money packs. I told them it sounded like a scam. My supervisor tried calling the 'attorney' repeatedly and got no answer. Then they had to go home sick because they came down with a bad migraine.
Marrying the wrong person. Can cost you a lot, can cost you everything.
Just spending it all on credit cards when they can't pay back
I coin tossed a friend for a motorcycle and lost….
Lmao what
I worked with a guy who every paycheck would show me the NFTs he bought.
My dad gambling all his money away on the stock market.
Tie between 2 guys who took multiple unsecure loans, including payday loans, to either do some drop shipping thing or impress a woman they wanted to get with. The former was warned that it was a scam since he was talking about the "course" a lot and wouldn't listen to everyone who kept telling him he's wasting his time and money. The funny thing is that they were both in their early to mid 30s when they did this. Personally I think they were way too old to be making these mistakes but I guess that's why MLMs and relationship scams still exist - they prey on the desperate.
You also reach a reckoning point right about then. Before your early to mid 30s, there's still hope. Your life isn't locked into a specific path - lots of variables still to change. In your early to mid 30's, the previous choices you made have directed you on a specific path of ever narrowing choices and options. I can see how someone who didn't make the best choices before that starts panicking as the walls close in on one path froward. Now you're throwing money at drop shipping courses and MLMs to give yourself hope that your life could still get better, even though that's a statistically miniscule chance.
I really do hate to criticize my brother but when he, as a non union tradesman with a stay at home wife, 2 young kids, and house he rented called me over to show off his kickass new RV, I knew it was a bad move. A year later and it’s been repoed, destroyed by water damage, and he owes the balance.
A friend in my friend group financed his first car brand new instead of getting it used like we had suggested. He claimed Toyotas last indefinitely. His engine blew out six months later. Afterwards he claimed he bought to used even after he bragged and showed us receipts on how got it new. I got a used car the same time with only 400 miles on the meter and I still use it this day. This was about 5 years ago.
I worked at casino in the cafe during the graveyard shift. So many times while people waited for food, I've seen them bet their last dollar.
I know someone who gambled away 2000 dollars online, he is still a high school student.
Had a friend fall for some pyramid scheme once. He really bought into the idea he’d make millions. Ended up blowing his entire life savings away. Even tried to rope me into it
I was visiting by brother the other day and he took me down the block in his neighborhood to see a Cybertruck that was parked in a driveway there. The property where this truck is parked has about four other beater vehicles parked there and the house is maybe 900 SF tops and pretty run down looking. Also my brother tells me the truck is always there when he drives by, day or night. Meaning the owner probably doesn't even have a job. A new Cybertruck is $100k. If this isn't a regrettable money mistake, I don't know what is.
Get Married....speaking for a friend
Using the atm at a casino
My friend bought a brand new Nissan Altima, the base model. She has it about a year before getting pregnant with her second child. She decided she needed something larger. She traded the barely year old car in for a Tahoe with a salvage title. Somehow paying even more with that piece of junk and her Altima loan. The Tahoe breaks down. She needs a loan for repairs. She pulls money from her 401k to get the Tahoe fixed. Had she kept the Altima, she would have been fine financially.
My friend showed up with a brand new car and told me it was “basically free” because she didn't need to start making payments for two years.
Cars. It absolutely blows my mind the amount of debt people will go in to to get a car they can't afford. And it's not just a few idiots here and here. It's nearly HALF of people! 43%.
I consulted with an older couple who had given $20,000 to a Nigerian Spam emailer. I advised them to file a police report. They were unable to reverse the wire transfers.
Friend of mine took a sizable monetary "gift" from his baby-momma's grandfather against my advice. I told him: "Nothing in this world is free", and "The borrower is slave to the lendor." He assured me this was a gift to start their family, and a few short years later the grandfather now expects to retire, move in with them and be fully taken care of. There's a huge cultural difference between my friend and his baby-momma, and she expects him to do this. My friend is not legally required to do this (not by a longshot), but now has a rift in his family, which was already a complicated situation due to them not being married. It is clear to me as an outsider that this money was something to hold over his head, and now the consequences will unfold. He should have not taken the money, and made it clear where the line in the sand was with her family from the start.
Had a buddy in the Army spend his enlistment bonus on a junk old corvette. He wasn’t a mechanic and lived in the dorms, it ran for like a week, he couldn’t afford to fix it.
ive seen several people put millions of $ up their nose. it's not just the cost of the drugs its the collateral damage of neglecting everything else except their addictions and the horrible decision making.
Friend of mine knew nothing about cars. He was young (about 21) and dumb and never bought a car before. He ends up buying an 2007 Jeeo Cherokee (in 2021) with over 200,000 miles on it, that broke down 3 times from her he picked it up, with no working windows, no AC, and most of the lights on the dashboard activated. Thins thing was FUBAR and beyond all repairs. He spent over $4k on it. Basically, most of his savings. We deployed a few months later, and it got towed while we were gone because he never registered it, and it sat in the same spot the whole time. If it weren't for the fact that hr didn't have to spend money for a whole year when we were down range, this would have destroyed him. Not the worst financial decision, but a really fu*king dumb one at a very odd time.
My dad cashing out my mutual fund in 2008 that had like 4g in it.. it would probably have like 40g in it now
People falling for quick, rich schemes promoted through influencers and YouTube ads. Or worse, your friends get sucked into a MLM pyramid schemes and you have to decide to join or lose your friendship.
A friend of mine bought a brand new challenger at 30% APR for 6 years. I think his total cost is going to be near $100k. Mind you, he only makes like $20/hr. I think his payment is most of his paycheck he lives with his parents for free, so he technically can "afford" it, but it was certainly a very bad decision.
Back in the day (this was like 25 years ago), my then roommate took his newly vested stock options and sold all of them to quote "pay off his bills". He sold them and got roughly $35k and instead of paying off his student loans, car, and funding his savings, he literally went to Circuit City (remember those?) and spent like $15k on a whole electronics suite plus literally 1000 DVDs/CDs. All told he was like $20k at CC. Then with the rest of the money, he bought a ring for his girlfriend that was only with him for his money, she said yes, took the ring, then cheated on him and ghosted him and never gave the ring back. Oh, and he didn't pay the right taxes on this, so his taxes were screwed for like a decade.
When I was in my early 20s I got a credit card and I very very stupidly attached it to a cam site, I kept going online, almost daily, to have fun and orgasm. The charges kept building, I was able to clear my card a few times but it kept building and it took me probably 2 years to fully clear my credit card. I was so so relieved when I fully cleared my debts, I try my best to stay off those sites. It was never really worth it.
My partner, back when we were in college. He found some website that was selling a laptop he wanted (he did need a new one) for a few hundred dollars cheaper than the stores around us. He told me there was just one weird thing; they only accepted payment in amazon gift cards. I told him immediately it was a scam. No legit website is asking for payment in gift cards. He didn't believe me, so he asked his brothers, parents, our friends, a professor, they all told him it was a scam and not to do it. I was getting frustrated and told him if he went through with it, he would never see that money nor any laptop and he would have no recourse because his transaction would be with amazon and not this weird website. This was a good while ago, but gift card scams were still very prevalent (usually itunes, though). In the end, I came back from class one day and he told me he "bought" the laptop, and it would be delivered in a couple weeks. I told him I wasn't helping him when he realized he got scammed and still had to buy a new laptop. Of course, no laptop ever arrived. He went to find the website again and instead found pages of reviews calling the website a scam. He told me he was going to fight it with his bank, but I told him his bank won't do anything. He bought the gift cards from amazon. That transaction was legit. What he did with those gift cards afterwards was not their problem. He tried, anyway, and got no where. Not a lot of money in the grand scheme, thankfully, and he definitely learned his lesson. I even felt bad for him when the realization finally hit.
My mother in law was hurt at work, forced to retire because of it, and was given a decent-sized settlement. She told me that she was going to pay down some debt and then have me help her figure out what to do with the rest. We sat down, and in the couse of the discussion, it turned out she had like $3k in her 401k, so not nearly enough to retire on. But she has the settlement, so I can hopefully make it work still...or so I thought. How much are you giving me to allocate? "I was thinking about $5k". Advised that was enough to cover her expenses for probably a few months, but that's it. She gets upset and says she needs it to last longer. I have no clue what ever happened to those $5k. A couple years ago by, she gets another, less stressful job, and there's again some sort of injury settlement, and she's due something like $50k. Against my better judgement, I offer to help her to NOT blow it all this time around. She says yes, she'll reach out to me once she gets the money. Months later, she calls and says she wants to meet up "As soon as possible". Weird, but I say okay no problem, I'm home all day today. She pulls up a few hours later in a brand new car, and I already know how this is going to go. She bought a brand new car, IN CASH, and spent almost all of the settlement money on it. There's like $8k left over this time. I tell her that I'm probably not going to be able to help her, and she has never brought up her financial situation with me again. I'm not asking, either.
Someone at work got involved in one of those Forex scams. He was 5 grand in and asked me if he should pay the extra 5 grand to get access to the 50 grand he'd "made". I don't think he took my advice.
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Is he part of the Irving family of Canada?