In what ways have you spent money and regretted it afterwards?
There are so many poor ways to spend money that I’m sure you know many of them. Just think about it. Examine your own spending patterns and, over the years, perhaps long term, consider how much you’ve spent on significant money mistakes.
Then there are those who make bad spending decisions but try to push them out of their minds. They try to forget, to ignore them. But do they learn lessons, or do they just repeat the same mistakes? You can kick yourself when you’ve made a bad purchase, buying something you won’t need, or something that doesn’t do the job, or making an investment that earns very little, leaving you feeling like a dried-up prune—useless, stupid, insane for repeating the mistake. You feel like banging your head against the wall.
Then there are the great bores of today. They’ll tell you in fine detail about their biggest spending and investing mistakes. You have to listen to what amounts to not a commiseration, but a long lecture, and you can’t get a word in edgewise. If you try, they’ll say something rude like, “I’m telling you a story. I’m telling you what happened. Be patient.” Their story is so important. Whether they’ve learned from it, who knows? But the old story, the one they dig out almost every time you see them, is the one they keep repeating.
Yes, there are many ways to waste money. If you go back and think of all the things you bought or invested in that didn’t pan out, it would amount to a huge sum, a massive sum, something you could—Today, when money is being eroded at an incredible pace, especially through inflation, taxation, government, and political corruption, the value of your money is decreasing rapidly. That’s when, if you ever think about it, you feel the real pain of bad money decisions.
Is there a secret to avoiding these incredibly bad money mistakes? Some may say there isn’t. Others may have found a secret. What’s your secret?
