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Life throws us curveballs and occasionally they end up costing us a fortune. Like, for example, crashing a Porsche on a test drive, or realizing you sold your Bitcoins years too early.
cat_bastard asked Reddit: What is the most expensive mistake you have ever made?
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, or profanity.
What a coincidence.
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I lost an envelope full of about $1000 on the bus. Pretty boring story, but a very expensive mistake.
That's a coincidence- I once found an envelope on a bus with somewhere around $1000 in it - one of the best days of my life when I was younger.
That's a coincidence- I once beat up a guy who had an envelope with around $1000 in it. He was like, "Take it! I just found it anyway!"
What a coincidence! I once picked the pocket of a thug for a $1000 envelope because I saw him assault a man and take it!
Sadly, I dropped the envelope and a dog came out of nowhere and picked it up and ran off with it.
What program has $30 million laying around that can be accidentally spent?
Not me but someone on my program ordered over $30M of inventory by mistake. Has been an on going process for a year to explain what happened and what to do with it.
What kind of inventory?
Dragon dildos.
Giving sloppy people authority has consequences.
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Someone did this with blow up paddling pools - instead of ordering 6 or so of each type for each store, they ordered full pallets (about 24 per pallet depending on size) of each type, each store.
That's 5000 of each type across the whole nation turned into 120k+.
My college administrator got drunk ordering new couches for our common room and instead of buying 4 bought 40. That was a 20 grand mistake.
Another place I worked in had the engineering manager try a new , cheaper, piece on a machine and then he proceeded to order enough to top up the stock for all the machines for several months.
The only machine the part actually fitted was the one he tried it on.
Space heaters - dangerous luxury.
Not moving a space heater when I thought about doing so. My house and business burned.
What kind of space heater were you using? How did it cause a fire?
A little propane heater, my blind dog knocked it over into her sleeping bag, she had her own path through out the house but she stumbled getting up off her bed, drug the corner of the bag on her foot. Her bed next to mine, it all went up in seconds, my business was upstairs and that's where I was when it happened.
Boat: Bust Out Another Thousand.
A boat that cost way too much to run, maintain, repair, and to pay all the endless fees associated with owning it.
It felt more like the "boat owned me" than vice versa.
I read a saying on reddit or elsewhere last week:
"You don't want to own a boat, you want a friend who owns a boat."
The two happiest days of a boat owner's life are the day he buys it and the day he sells it (or she).
Getting a new ID sucks (but in New York you can do it online).
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Just lost my wallet with $300 cash and some good gift cards literally last night. Now I have to buy another wallet and id. The most annoying things to ever buy.
Just use the ID that comes with the wallet.
That's gotta sting.
Sold my 16 bitcoin for $200 dollars each.
Nobody has ever gone broke selling for a profit.
You did alright, try not to dwell on it too much.
When Bitcoins were first starting a guy offered to sell me 300 of them for $30. I declined because all the speculation at the time said that they would be worthless. I was making about minimum wage at the time and $30 was a lot.
I lost contact with the guy, hope he held out, but he probably sold super early too.
Could be worse. You could be like James Howells.
Guy got into bitcoin mining in 2009 when Bitcoins were practically worthless. He mined 7500 coins then sold off the laptop he'd used to mine them, but kept the hard-drive in case his bitcoins were ever worth something.
In 2013, he meant to throw away and old empty drive and accidentally threw away the drive containing his bitcoins
When he lost it, it was worth around $10 million. At it's peak, it was worth $148,372,500.
It's worth $36,817,500 today.
Oh noooooooo.
Agree with people saying marriage but my close second was buying a Porsche and driving it "just to get it home" without insurance. Years of payments on a wrecked car.
Ugh... insurance before it leaves the lot. The car dealers here are normally pretty good at ensuring insurance.
Yea they had me call and switch it over while I was in the office signing papers.
This milk is worth crying over.
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There are plenty of other decisions that have resulted in bigger problems or costs, but this one is the best story.
Grew up on a dairy farm. Occasionally there would be cows that were treated with medicines or antibiotics that weren't allowed in the milk. They were milked separately into a bucket so that the milk wouldn't mix with the rest of the "good", antibiotic-free milk.
One of the rules when you used the "hot bucket" was to make sure you dumped it after every cow. If not, there was a chance the milk from the treated cow would overflow into the pipe that led to the bulk tank where the rest of the milk was cooled and stored.
One day I forgot to dump the hot bucket, and sure enough, a little bit of milk with antibiotics in it made it to the bulk tank. We took a sample to a testing facility and sure enough, the entire tank was ruined because of my mistake. I had to stand there and watch while 7200 pounds of now worthless milk ran straight down the drain. (7200 pounds is about 830 gallons. The value was somewhere around $1300 to my Dad...who wasn't happy to say the least.)
Sounds like spilled milk worth crying about.
Ya think?
In retrospect, getting married at 19 was kinda dumb.
As long as it was childless. It's a pain in the ass to escape a marriage... there is no escaping a child (those little shits can be amazing at hide and seek).
I got married at 30. Still dumb.
Sometimes insurance needs more nuance.
Was selling a motorcycle I owed $17500 on. An interested party arrived took the bike for a ride a never came back.
Called the insurance, according to them the bike was not stolen because I gave the guy the key.
I ended up with having to pay the $17500 on a bike I no longer had.
It's theft because they had no intent to return it. Also how come you couldn't report the vehicle as stolen???
It is theft, but a form called "theft by conversion" which isn't covered by insurance because it would be far too easy to make fraudulent claims. It's a crime, but insurance isn't designed to cover all crimes.
Ouch, quite the wasted commitment - and money.
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Built a gaming PC for my now ex-gf.
Paid for all the components ?
About 1200€, yeah.
Abandon ship.
I accidentally clipped a fiber optic line on an LHA with an angle grinder in a very tight space. Blade kicked and burst. Any part of the line gets damaged the whole thing is ruined, and on a 900+ foot ship that was alot of line. Cost of replacement line and labor was over $300,000.
An effective lesson, DWIs are.
Getting a DWI.
That's the number one reason I quit drinking.
I just stay home. Can't get in trouble if you don't go anywhere.
Tell that to my wife.
Credit card debt is a neverending pit of despair.
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Was a young dumbass who had just moved out from my parents place and into my own digs. It did not take long for the various financial institutions to start sending me adverts for credit cards.
I was a party animal and a gadget hound. It took me no time at all to get into trouble. Took years paying off the debt.
My little brother just got his first credit card and bought a ps4 and a tv. He makes money and assures me he'll pay it off before the 6 months no interest is up. I really hope he's right.