Looking back in anger? Tell us your greatest financial regrets

I was persuaded to take out a ten year with profits endowment with the promise of a good return. I would have earned more from it under the mattress, since I paid in more than I got back. This was sold as a low risk investment. Later, these endowments were generally frowned upon, but, of course this was too late. Someone, somewhere made money from my loss.

Many years ago Barclays had a good banking deal. You linked your current account to a savings account and any balance over £500 was automatically transferred from current to savings to earn interest. The reverse also happened. I got so used to this that I overlooked the interest rate dropping to a pathetic 0.1% (when market rates were significantly higher) and lethargy let it go on for too long before I woke up to the need to do something about it.
The lesson I learned was to watch for these sorts of financial practices in future, and I am now much better at moving savings around when the reward is worthwhile.

My father left meticulous records of his investments but there were several points I was unsure of, so I put the estate in the hands of a solicitor after doing the bulk of the work myself. I was horrified by the charges. When my mother died several years later I felt more confident, completed all the documents and passed the computer files to the solicitor – expecting to pay much less. Once again, I was horrified when the bill arrived and it will take a lot to make me trust solicitors in future.

I switched from a repayment mortgage to an endowment mortgage around the time when this was seen as a good way of making a generous profit for a modest increase in monthly payments. In one way I was one of the lucky ones who did not end up with a deficit at the end of the period, but I was unable to claim that the endowment mortgage was mis-sold.

I never understood why [in my naïvety] when I moved house about 25 years ago the transfer of funding by the acting solicitor from the sale of my old house to the new one ended up in my being charged a large amount of interest by my bank. When I queried this with the bank they informed me the solicitor failed to use the electronic CHAPS system which mean’t the funding for the purchase of the new house was removed from my account before the funding from the sale of the old house was transferred into my account. I eventually discovered it had spent two days over the weekend sitting in the solicitors account [and no doubt gaining interest].

The bank fortunately did waive the interest charges but I couldn’t help wondering if this was normal practice for solicitors at the time. This was of course in addition to all the legal fees incurred.

Motherhood is one of the lowest paid jobs in the world and does not come with a pension. For those who give up their career to raise children the pension of the working spouse gets larger while the mother`s pension often comes to a standstill. Perhaps things have changed since the 1970`s?

My biggest regret was in the early 1980`s. The phone rang and I turned to my former husband saying the DPW want to know whether I want to pay X in to my final retirment pension?
He called back to me saying `No, my pension will cover you, don`t worry`.

When we divorced he had a full state pension, a private pension, and investments.
My second regret is not educating myself about finances and taking responsibility for the future.
but hindsight is a great thing : ) ((*_*))

There’s a clear all-time winner for me in terms of financial regrets.

Back in December 2011 a single bitcoin was worth about $2 (USD). Today a single bitcoin is worth about $375 (USD). If only I’d put £10,000 into bitcoin back in 2011, it would be worth around £1.8 million today. At the time, I didn’t take bitcoin seriously, because I didn’t know much about it.

Bitcoin isn’t just a currency, it’s a payment system that uses cryptography to create a decentralised public ledger that verifies ownership. It’s a really clever idea that could forever change how money is moved around the world, just for a start. It still has the potential to invade the global forex market in a big way.

However, the bitcoin community is in something of a crisis right now. There’s a big dispute amongst software developers in bitcoin concerning something called ‘block size’. It’s possible that if this crisis is not successfully resolved it could halt any chance of wider adoption for a very long time, which means the price would be likely to dive.

I do still own some bitcoin, but it’s a risky investment. It could go to zero, but if bitcoin can survive the current crisis and scale for wider adoption the price could yet go much higher, so I’m willing to take a risk.

I’ve sold a lot of my bitcoins recently due to the high risk situation re the block size crisis. If the crisis is resolved I’ll probably buy back in. I’ve made a reasonable return on what I sold, much better than any savings account or ISA would have given me. But nowhere near as good as getting 187 times your money back!