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The Seven Silliest Money Stunts I’ve Ever Pulled

What are the silliest things you’ve ever done where money was concerned?

Me, I don’t know that I could count them all. The alliterative “seven” is definitely too few to cover all the bizarre money tricks I’ve pulled over the course of a lifetime. Some were risks I shouldn’t have taken. Some were the result of laziness or inertia. Some were miscalculations or the long-term outcome of misunderstanding. Some were just flicking stupid. In at least one case, better minds than mine made the same error. Here are my Top Seven Silly Stunts:

7. Spent $100 on a lottery ticket for a charitable cause.

6. Spent way too much on fix-up of various houses.

5. Majored in French because the chair of the French department told me, then a 17-year-old freshman, that I wouldn’t have to waste my time in  beginning language courses if I would declare myself a French major (at the time I had no idea this amounted to a financial decision!).

4. Walked from a free ride to graduate school because I was depressed over breaking up with a boyfriend.

3. Later, did the same damn-fool thing again, this time to get married.

2. Failed to anticipate the Great Recession but instead proceeded as though good times would roll forever.

1. Failed to seek a teaching job in the much better paying-community colleges but instead, out of inertia, remained in a comparable but ill-paid job at the Great Desert University.

Ever done anything silly with your money?

4 thoughts on “The Seven Silliest Money Stunts I’ve Ever Pulled”

  1. LOL, some definite ones worth cringing over, though in retrospect, they could have been a lot worse. I have a few that pop into my head but I’ll have to think about this….thinking this could become a post.

  2. Your grad school mistakes remind me of my own “breaking up with a boyfriend” mistake. I had this great job in NYC. I was chosen out of hundreds of applicants. I’d only been there a month and I loved my job. It had so much potential. But when a long-term relationship started crumbling, part of the shrapnel was the job. One of my regrets to this day.

  3. Made the same decision re grad school vs. getting married.
    Also, 35 years ago in college, I was interested in the emerging phenomenon of autism in children, but my psych professor wrote it off as too small a field to be a viable career. I could be a revered expert by now if I hadn’t given his opinion too much weight.
    The worst impact of a silly decision was resigning a job just 2 months before I would have been fully vested in the retirement plan. No one warned me that they used calendar years instead of actual work years when figuring eligibility. Ouch. Lost all the employer contributions.

  4. Buying a boat was one I’d like to have back. The truest aphorism of them all: “The two best days you own a boat? The day you buy it, and the day you sell it.”

    Buy assets, sell liabilities. (And obviously, don’t do the opposite.) Do this often enough and you can’t help but build wealth.

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