Ask HN: What's a lesson about money you learned the expensive way?

3 points·pg1··5 comments

Could be trading, investing, saving, taxes, a scam, a bad bet on yourself — anything.

What happened, and what do you do differently now?

Diversify.

My dad advised me to put some money into stocks around 2004 or so, specifically suggested Lloyds bank on the grounds that "if they went bankrupt we have bigger problems".

Then the global financial crisis happened.

The LLOY share price has still not recovered to the price I bought them at. Thanks to share dilution during the GFC, even inflation probably won't bring the price back to the level I paid for them by the time I reach current mean life expectancy.

Yeah, I also got burned by this. I spent three months saving up and invested in Lucid Motors back in 2021, only to lose 98% of my money.

A lot of my younger friends saw their parents spend countless number of hours trying to time the market with specific stock investments, only to get burned in a similar way.

Most of them have now committed to simple dollar-cost averaging against broad index funds like VT.

I wouldn't say stock picking is a bad idea. If you're interested in finance and willing to learn how it works, it can be a great hobby, and you can potentially make money from it too. Otherwise, DCAing into an index fund is probably the easiest and best solution.

Debt is a tool, not a convenience.

It's a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot with that attitude.

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