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I was sent a link to a post by Broke Grad Student in which there was a contest for the deepest, darkest financial secret in the spirit of the famed Post Secret. The following day I was sent another link to Squawkfox asking What were your 3 worst financial decisions. The sad part is that upon receiving the links to both of these posts I was able to list five awful financial miscalculations right off the top of my head, without missing a beat.
After everything that has happened over the last several months and weeks it seems clear that we all need to take a look at how we've spent money in the past and the mistakes that have been made not just on Wall Street but in our personal coffers. So in the spirit of participation in sharing, I begged my nearest and dearest to tell me their financial dirty little secrets. Though in the interest of full disclosure I will first share mine. Ready?
When I moved to Spain in 2005, the first thing I did was to take out money. The money that my parents had given me for the first part of my time there because I had approximately zero dollars to my name (I had spent all of my Kerry-Edwards money on clothing from the Gap) and had maxed out three credit cards before departing. Upon arrival, I took out a good amount in Euros forgetting that there was a difference between euros and dollars and at the time the euro was worth twice as much as the dollar and wow...I found that out the hard way. I spent the money on mojitos and the following morning, met my host family with a hangover. This set the tone for the remainder of my six months in Europe where I continually ran out of money and called my parents begging for more. For really important things like trips to Amsterdam and a car rental in Gibraltar. I returned home to graduate from college and several Suze Orman books as a present. Lesson (almost) learned. I think that running out of money, continuously, while out of the country is pretty high up on the list of stupid things that people can do with their finances.
And because misery loves company, I begged several bloggers to share their own financial bad behavior:
Jess at See, Hear, Speak No Evil:
when i started college, i was 17 years old. i had taken a couple of
college classes in high school, and so i had a 4.0 GPA at the
university. they bombard new students with all these credit card
applications, so i filled one out when i was buying all my books. a few
weeks later, i got a card in the mail - and a $1500 limit. i didn't use
the card for several months, but then i met this guy. and everything
went downhill from there. to make a long story short, i spent money i
didn't have - and could never really pay back. this guy also cost me
tons of money. whatever. so of COURSE, i do what any dumb insecure girl
would do - and i marry him!marrying him was a bad financial
decision in and of itself. he had bad credit, he had to file bankruptcy
AND he owed back taxes to the IRS. oh and i knew all this - but i
married him anyway. good idea, right? have you totally lost all respect
for me? (assuming you had any to begin with...) we decide to build a
house. and he does tons of sweat equity - but i still don't know where
all that money went at closing. STILL. oh wait, back up, we also leased
a brand new car. before we bought the house. yeah, cuz we're awesome
like that. he always changed jobs, too. he always had one, but they
didn't always pay well.you'll never guess this, but we got
divorced. we tried to sell the house, but it was foreclosed on. so now
i had two kids, credit card debt and bad credit. we had tried to do a
chapter 13, but it was tossed out by the bank because our car was "too
nice." lost the car. lost the house. lost almost everything i "owned."somehow, i managed to pick myself up - i worked
out deals with my creditors and i paid all my bills off. i did take out
a piece of my pension, which gave me a tax penalty, but i don't regret
that now because it helped me so
