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I was a subscriber to Netflix in it’s early days and came to believe they could take on video stores like Blockbuster. Their stock was trading around $9 and after some research I put in an order to buy a few hundred shares on a Friday afternoon. The market had just closed and the trade would happen on Monday. When I went into work Saturday there was the current issue of Barron’s. The cover story I will always regret seeing was Netflix, love the company not the stock. After reading it I decided to cancel my order when I got home. Oh well,
I was about forty before I started making decent money because of a series of missteps and start-overs, trying to find the right career after my short baseball career ended. I wish I had gotten an Accounting degree and started my career climb much sooner. I’ve still managed to get to the brink of FI at fifty-five, but I’d be much better off with an earlier start.
Getting shook when the world gets scary and trying to time the market.
Not saving and investing until my mid-thirties. Not actively educating myself about retirement until retirement was thrust upon me.
I had a boatload of options in a good company that was acquired by another company that was very volatile. I should have exercised all of my options immediately, but instead only exercised a part of them. The volatile company got into terminal trouble fairly quickly, and the value of my remaining options fell “out of the money”. (I learned the value of diversification the hard way, but that lesson eventually helped me quite a bit in later years.)
Invested in penny stocks believing I’d be a millionaire soon
MARKET TIMING
All of mine are similar in that all have to do w impatience and miscalc of greed-fear, so pay attention to patience (ha, easy to advise).
I assume this is common.
I absolutely should have sold asap (fearlessly, heedless of taxes) some own-company and other insanely runup tech stock in the mid-’90s, post ipo and all that, and then *exactly* the same situation in the later 1990s and early 2000s. Most of those moneys eventually (soon) cratered.
More important and more recent, I should have stayed the course after the covid dip recovery (3/20ff) — after reaching breakeven, I majorly rebalanced, whereas if I had held I would be helping finance kids’ housing changes now.
phooey
The latter regret is during retirement, which of course colors everything.
All this said, these are privilege probs, — not like being truly straitened, or worse, in this country much less elsewhere.
In my earliest days of investing, I didn’t understand how large commissions could be, and felt it would be rude to ask for such details – seriously! Consequently, one of my earliest and largest investments in 1978 was an annuity on which I later realized I had paid a 40% percent commission. I still hold that investment, and it kills me to think what it would be worth had I invested that money more knowledgeably.
My biggest regret is not saying no when I should have said no. I married young and left too many spending decisions to my spoiled first wife. If I had invested instead of paying credit card interest, I likely could have retired at age 55.
Investing in a wrap account with front loaded high fee active funds. Luckily I think the true cost was limited to 10-20K. This kick-started me down the path to self-directed investing. The day I transferred the last $ and closed that account was a day I celebrated.
I tried to get too cute with investments and risk in the early 2010s. I had most of my money in low-cost index funds, but I also kept too much cash considering my still modest net worth and rising salary. I should have just parked it all in a target-date fund and not bothered tweaking.
Nowadays, I have more in cash and bonds since my net worth is higher (I’m sort of near that point where I have ‘won the game’ so why get too risky?) and my salary is a lot lower since I don’t have a 9-5 job. And my current profession is really correlated to how financial markets perform. So it makes more sense to not be all-in on stocks despite me being just 33yo.
I think a lot of us dialed back risk too much right around 2010. I had good reasons, but the main thing I confirmed is that my risk tolerance is indeed fairly high (though I’ve dialed it down a little as I’ve aged.)
Spending so many years trying to be a stock picker instead of an index investor was a big mistake (as was selling AAPL back around 2001).
My biggest financial regret is that, I worked hard for money but didn’t let the money work as hard for me. How? Because I remained un-invested in stocks for the entire first half of my career.
It wasn’t due to lack of stead income or good money habits, but lack of financial literacy and investment knowledge. I saved quite a bit, but left the money in CDs and Bank accounts.
A small example of my goof-up: I started my current job in early 2000 and was contributing only a small amount to my 401k. It was the default option during initial enrollment. The money was invested in a conservative mutual fund. I don’t recall why I chose that one, but most probably because it was the first one in the list. Anyone with basic financial knowledge would’ve made full 401k contribution in my situation and invested aggressively. Well, better late than never!
My entire life I have been a saver and a planner. I’ve made decisions, like not attending sporting events or other fun activities, purely to maintain focus to my studies and “getting ahead” by reading books, attending additional classes, etc. My biggest financial regret is not allocating more time and money to experiences and being so relentlessly focused on saving and advancing in my career. A little more fun along the way wouldn’t have hurt.