The 3 dumbest money mistakes you can ever make

Good morning Dinks.  So often we read about all the great things that people do with their money to save it, grow it and keep it safe.  But what about all the bad things that people do to lose their money, not invest it wisely and just plain waste their money? I for one love reading more about peoples mistakes than their glories, although sometimes I am a sucker for a good success story.

You know the saying “Learn from my mistakes”, well that’s exactly how I learned about how to manage money.  As a teenager and young adult I had no idea how to manage money and I made a ton of mistakes like overspending on clothes and dining out, applying for several credit cards that I couldn’t afford and making only the minimum monthly payments on all of my credit cards.

I like to know what not what to do with money as oppose to knowing exactly what to do because I feel if I know what not to do everything else will work itself out.

So here we are, these are 3 dumb money mistakes that I see people make every day

1. Counting on money that you are hoping for but don’t have.  People do this a lot with their tax return refund.  They hope for the best situation, aka a big tax refund, and make plans for the money before they even know if or how much money they are going to receive.   The problem with having expectations for money is that you are fixated on what you want to buy with the money and if it turns out that you aren’t getting a tax refund you spend the money anyways…usually on a credit card because you don’t actually have the money.  This is a problem.

2. Don’t spend money on your credit card and hope to pay it off later.   This was my personal motto in my early 20s.  Every single time I wanted to buy something but didn’t have the money I would tell myself “It’s OK I will charge it now and worry about paying it later.” That is a really bad financial habit, actually it’s probably the worst financial habit you can have.  What usually ends up happening is that you keep spending money and don’t have the income to pay it off.  Definitely a bad financial habit.

3. Don’t keep cash in your wallet.  I could leave my house at 8:30 am with $20 in my wallet and by noon it will be gone.  Breakfast, a snack, some gum and a coffee later all of my money is gone.  It’s easy to spend money when we have cash on hand; so don’t keep cash on hand.  Spending money can quickly add up when we say “Oh it’s no big deal if I spend $4 on coffee and it’s nothing if I spend $5 on breakfast”, but if we do that three times it can quickly add up and our $20 is suddenly gone…and then some.

What is your dumbest money mistake?

Photo by jaaron

Kristina Tahnyak

Tahnya is a Certified Financial Planner and former Investment Advisor turned marketing and communications professional She holds a degree from Concordia University, is debt free and currently works in the field of digital marketing.