Easy Ways to Make a Money Mess
Just as a snowball can start an avalanche and one match can ignite an inferno, these 15 mistakes are easy to make and can lead to financial trouble for the rest of your life.
From your choice of college to your choice of spouse, from job selection to retirement planning, we take a look at 15 common ways you can mess up your money future.
1. Don't Discuss Money
Before Marriage
Our blogger married for love, not money, but wishes she had asked her husband more questions about the latter before they tied the knot. It wasn't until after the wedding that she learned about his six-figure student loans and credit-card balance of $15,000.
2. Get a Divorce
D-I-V-O-R-C-E. A well-known song, the follow up for which should have been P-O-V-E-R-T-Y. The process of divorce is costly for both parties, financially and emotionally, and the ongoing expenses of divided households and shared parenting, of alimony and child support, often ruin the financial futures of both of the once-lovebirds.
3. Buy a House You Can't Afford
What happens when you buy a home that you really can't afford? When economizing doesn't work, people often liquidate assets and borrow from their 401(k) to keep up with payments. Talk about putting your financial future in jeopardy
4. Don't Diversify Your Investments
By not diversifying your portfolio -- for example, investing in just a couple of
stocks -- you run the risk of tying your future to the fate of a single company. If you bet on the wrong horse, that mistake could put you in the hole for the rest of your life.
5. Drive Stupidly
The National Safety Council estimated in 2006 that the average cost per auto crash where there were no disabling injuries was $8,200. If someone was hurt badly in the crash, but not killed, the average cost was $55,000. If someone died because of the wreck, the cost was more than $1.2 million. Survivors of such an accident could spend the rest of their lives recovering their financial health.
6. Start Smoking
The financial costs of this nasty habit are far more than the cost of a pack of cigarettes. Smokers pay more for insurance, dry cleaning, and dental care. Their homes and cars have less resale value, they are at higher risk of having a fire, and many companies won't even hire a smoker.
7. Go to a College You Can't Afford
Here's the reality: attending a private school at the expense of taking on a large debt load -- or worse, depleting the parents' nest egg -- will result in increased stress and constrained career choices, without increasing opportunities beyond what a student of the same ability could have done with a less expensive public college education.
8. Choose Wrong Health Insurance
When you're young and virile, health insurance can seem unimportant. Choose unwisely, though, and you can spend a lifetime paying for your mistake. Too little, and a neck injury can leave you broke for life. Buying too much saps money that could be invested, compounding for decades.
9. Rack Up Credit Card Debt
Instant gratification, the mantra of the late 20th century, has resulted in a massive amount of credit card debt. The result? Millions of Americans paying the minimum on their credit card debt, compounding at a usurious 20% interest, all for the privilege of buying a meal they can't remember eating, a tune they now loathe, or shoes that Carrie Bradshaw would burn.
10. Stay in a Dead-End Job
Given the advances in medicine, today's twenty-somethings may well have a work life of seventy years, and that's way too long to spend in even a good-paying dead-end job. Once you've become accustomed to that income, have a family and a mortgage, you're locked into that job with golden handcuffs.
11. Don't Save Enough for Retirement
We are doing a terrible job saving for retirement. The median 401(k) plan balance is a paltry $18, 986! While there is raging debate over how much you need to save in order to retire with dignity, everyone would agree that most Americans are falling woefully short of achieving this goal.
12. Ignore Credit Disputes
Think you left disputed credit card issues behind when you changed addresses? The company may not have your new address, but it does have access to your credit ratings. When you decide to buy that first home, you'll find a land mine awaiting you in your credit report.
13. Don't Create an Emergency Fund
Not surprisingly, few of us are prepared financially for a hurricane. Sadly, many of us are not even prepared for predictable calamities -- a car breakdown, a broken arm, a plane trip to the funeral of a loved one. Whatever happened to the rainy day fund? Because we guarantee it's going to rain.
14. Squander Youthful Riches
Sudden wealth thrust upon the young, such as was common before the dot com bubble burst, poses a temptation few can resist. Driving hot cars, visiting hot spots, hobnobbing with the glitterati, seem like such a good idea at the time. Too bad such fun often comes at the cost of a lifetime of financial security.
15. Do Business With a Handshake
A man's (or woman's) handshake is his/her word, we would like to believe. However, if the devil is in the details, how can every nuance of an understanding be communicated with the pressing of flesh? There's a lesson to be learned from a house closing; all that paperwork is there because doing business with a handshake can lead to financial calamity.
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