Which Resonates With You?

Have you read Seven Financial Mistakes That Ended Badly?

I’ll give you a short summary…

1. The Dream-Car-For-A-Year The woman finally gets her dream car just to have all kinds of problems with it in the second year she has it.  Doesn’t go into much on the financial side, I’d love to hear how much this cost her?
2. The Expensive Student Loan To me it’s the normal college kid who doesn’t know what he wants with his life and then ends up graduating with college loans, $42,546.  I actually can beat this but I’ll save this for a future post.
3. The Business Financed by Credit Cards Pretty self explanatory how his dreams were bigger than his wallet.  He did end up selling the business off but not without first damaging his credit.  I assume this has some lasting effects.
4. The Risky 529 Thinking His son had a long timeframe and could be more aggressive and ended up taking a huge hit with in the recent market.  “Sorry little buddy, maybe you’ll decide to skip college”  Ouch!
5. The More-Than-Expected Home Wanting to build their dream home they went way over budget.  To make matters worse it means higher assessment, higher taxes, higher insurance, higher mortgage payments and more interest.
6. The (Un)Spectacular Day Trading Imagine day trading going back.  He didn’t know what he was doing and is now a buy-and-hold guy.  He lost $10,000.
7. The Eggs-In-One-Basket He thought he could make money in the stock market and didn’t know what he was doing.  Put all his money in 1 stock that he thought would take off.  It didn’t and he lost half his money.

Which of these scenarios offers the most to learn for you?  For me, numbers 1,3,6 and 7 will never come into play.  I’ve already learned these lessons.  Maybe #5 will because I do want to build a dream home someday so this is good advice, mostly due to the trickle down effect.  I’m still living #2.

That leaves #4.  I just have this picture in my mind of a father and son sitting at the breakfast table with their bowls of cereal in front of them.  The father asks if they can talk and the son nods his head chomping away at his cereal.  The father says I have some bad news and tells him about the 529 plan.  The son stops eating looks up and says “that’s okay Daddy, I still love you”.  Then goes back to munching away.  The good kids always forgive their dad.  Or maybe he just doesn’t comprehend what’s just been said.

Let’s talk about avoiding this situation, e-mail me.

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Tagged as: 529, cars, homes, investing, stocks, student loan