What's the biggest financial mistake you've ever made?

[el kaka22]

I mean this is going to be simple and naive, but I guess selling my bitcoins when I needed it, would be number one. I could have kept it, take a loan out, and pay my debt with my new debt.

I had debt so I paid it by cashing out bitcoin back in the day, and if I did not do that, took a loan and pay my debt with that loan and slowly paid that loan back instead, and kept my bitcoin until today, even when it is not 125k like peak, even at this price, hell even at like 30-40k, that would have been multiple coins and would have made me much richer than I am right now.

[Wind_FURY]

I mean this is going to be simple and naive, but I guess selling my bitcoins when I needed it, would be number one. I could have kept it, take a loan out, and pay my debt with my new debt.

I had debt so I paid it by cashing out bitcoin back in the day, and if I did not do that, took a loan and pay my debt with that loan and slowly paid that loan back instead, and kept my bitcoin until today, even when it is not 125k like peak, even at this price, hell even at like 30-40k, that would have been multiple coins and would have made me much richer than I am right now.

In my own/personal opinion, that's OK. It actually proves it to yourself that Bitcoin is an effective asset wherein to store your savings, AND it's also useful as working capital if you need to liquidate some of it to pay your debts.

I would always say that you should HODL your Bitcoin, but if you have nothing left and no choice but to liquidate some of your Bitcoin, then you need to do it.

[GiftedMAN]

I wouldn't remember all the financial mistakes I have made but the recent one that is still affecting me is investing in a transportation business when I wasn't around to monitor it very well. A little of people don't know how important it is to invest in a business you have experience in and also have time to check mate what's happening in your business so in my case I let trust play a bad role in my investment and it affected me very much but the lesson has been learnt this year but I hope I don't pass that anger to someone else who will want me to invest in a good business again.

[BlackHatCoiner]

My biggest financial mistake is not creating an account in this forum a few years earlier. Seriously. If only I had created an account just two years before Covid, I would have earned a lot more money.

I first heard of Bitcoin in 2018 when a teacher of mine suggested I should look into it, and that I will regret not doing it. I did not actually read about it up until March 2020, two years later. The teacher was right. It all happens for a reason, I guess.

[yhiaali3]

I made many financial mistakes, but the biggest one was not adhering to a clear consistent strategy, constantly switching from one strategy to another and chasing trends. This cost me a lot of losses.

Switching between strategies and not sticking to one strategy until the goal was achieved caused me a lot of losses. With every failed attempt I would go back to my first strategy but my lack of strategic patience made me change the strategy every time.

Because that's the discretionary sort of "trading strategy" that many people adopt because they believe that they could "outsmart" the market, and get asymmetrical trades that will "beat" other traders' trading performance.

 

But we're plebs, and there's only ONE strategy that works for US - HODL BITCOIN. I'm very confident that merely a HANDFUL of people currently in BitcoinTalk are profitable in "trading" with a large sample size.

Yes, I agree. Only a very small number of people make good profits from trading, and even they often experience losing deals.

Therefore, after years of experience, I found that the best strategy is indeed to hold Bitcoin for the long term, although I have become somewhat addicted to trading, but I only trade in small amounts.

[OgNasty]

I've made some financial mistakes in my life.  Buying a home during the housing boom in 2006 certainly seems like one.  I ended up living a great life there though, so it's hard to complain looking back.

Most of my financial mistakes involve selling.  What Warren Buffett says is true.  I think I would have been better off had I never sold a single stock in my life.  It is hard to impress that on youth, but all you really have to do is just keep buying stocks in good companies and never sell them.  It took me 20 years of trading stocks before I figured that out.

[Mame89]

My biggest financial mistake was overly trusting altcoins when I first started learning about crypto. Even then, I still believed their prices would rise again, so I held onto them until they were worthless. This is the decision I regret most because I sold some of my Bitcoin just to buy atlcoin.

But after making that mistake, I learned a lot. It may have been painful at first, but after reflection, it was a lesson learned. To this day, I only prioritize Bitcoin in my portfolio and don't sacrifice Bitcoin to buy altcoins. Even though I bought atlcoins with fundamentals like ETH, I did so with the money I had set aside after doing DCA on Bitcoin not from selling Bitcoin. BtW, I made this mistake in 2016, when I was still a beginner in the crypto world.

[Muba20]

My biggest financial mistake at the beginning of my investment was not having complete confidence in Bitcoin. After buying Bitcoin, I sold the coin again and later try to buy it when the price increased. In other words, I had to accept financial mistakes due to not being able to settle in one place. I believe that if I had developed a tendency to hold Bitcoin for the long term at that time, I would definitely not have accepted such a situation. My greed and ignorance affected me enough. However, over time, I tried to make myself experienced in this matter. I tried to make future plans by taking care not to repeat all the mistakes that I had made in the past.

[Cheema02]

The biggest mistake of my life is that I became rich overnight in a short time. I once invested about ten thousand dollars in Bitcoin and by selling that investment, I bought some altcoins so that I could get hundreds of times more profit, but the regret is that after a few days, my investment disappeared from the market. As a result, if I had the same amount of Bitcoin as I bought Bitcoin with the equivalent of ten thousand dollars, I could have become rich today, but because I became rich in a short time, all my investments came down to zero balance.

Its not bad to becoming rich instantly because a lot of risk is involved behind it. For getting a lot of profit individuals needs a lot of information to make decision to making a decision for investing and if they remain successful then they generate a lot of profit and instance success and many investors believes that they earn profit always. But high outputs requires a high risk. But every individual have not the same investing powers and resources because not every investors have the resources to invest in Bitcoins. If we research every investor has the story of struggled and regrets and the important thing is the learning from there mistakes and have a perfect experience to measure risk and have the abilities to manage it. your mistakes helps to make good and wise decisions for investing and you can get profit easily through it.

[steve5946]

I've made some financial mistakes in my life.  Buying a home during the housing boom in 2006 certainly seems like one.  I ended up living a great life there though, so it's hard to complain looking back.

Most of my financial mistakes involve selling.  What Warren Buffett says is true.  I think I would have been better off had I never sold a single stock in my life.  It is hard to impress that on youth, but all you really have to do is just keep buying stocks in good companies and never sell them.  It took me 20 years of trading stocks before I figured that out.

I think there's a difference between buying a home as an investment and buying a home to live in. Even if the timing wasn't ideal from a market perspective, it sounds like the house provided years of value and enjoyment, which is something that doesn't show up on a balance sheet. I'm curious: was there a particular stock or investment you sold years ago that you later realized would have been life changing if you had just kept holding it?

My biggest financial mistake was overly trusting altcoins when I first started learning about crypto. Even then, I still believed their prices would rise again, so I held onto them until they were worthless. This is the decision I regret most because I sold some of my Bitcoin just to buy atlcoin.

But after making that mistake, I learned a lot. It may have been painful at first, but after reflection, it was a lesson learned. To this day, I only prioritize Bitcoin in my portfolio and don't sacrifice Bitcoin to buy altcoins. Even though I bought atlcoins with fundamentals like ETH, I did so with the money I had set aside after doing DCA on Bitcoin not from selling Bitcoin. BtW, I made this mistake in 2016, when I was still a beginner in the crypto world.

Well, I like the idea of diversifying into other assets, but sacrificing a strong position in Bitcoin for more speculative opportunities can be a costly decision if those opportunities don't work out. I've learnt that the hard way.

My biggest financial mistake at the beginning of my investment was not having complete confidence in Bitcoin. After buying Bitcoin, I sold the coin again and later try to buy it when the price increased. In other words, I had to accept financial mistakes due to not being able to settle in one place. I believe that if I had developed a tendency to hold Bitcoin for the long term at that time, I would definitely not have accepted such a situation. My greed and ignorance affected me enough. However, over time, I tried to make myself experienced in this matter. I tried to make future plans by taking care not to repeat all the mistakes that I had made in the past.

Sometimes the biggest mistake isn't buying the wrong asset, it's failing to maintain conviction in the right one. When prices move quickly, it's easy to second guess ourselves and believe we'll be able to time the market, but in reality, very few people do that consistently, which some people may debate to be luck.

[freedomgo]

If you enter in a bullish market, this is most likely what will happen to an investor. Instead of trying to be more understanding and patient when the bearish market turns over, but its hard to do that since the longer you keep seeing bitcoin price dropping low, the more losses you are going to endure if you don't decide selling now rather than wait for another dip to come.

So I really understand your point. But you can always go back buying bitcoin, just make sure you make the perfect entry when bitcoin price is certainly low.

Now my biggest financial mistake is not prioritizing bitcoin but focus more on some other investment that turned out scam in the later part. I'd learned my lesson already, that's why every time the market offers a big opportunity to purchase bitcoin at a very low price, I always grab it so I won't be missing every  market opportunity with bitcoin.

[rillex.games]

My biggest financial mistake was trusting quick profit ideas without doing enough research.

I learned that fast money usually comes with hidden risk. Whether it is crypto, trading, business, or gambling, the mistake is the same when you put money in without understanding the rules, fees, risks, and exit plan.

Now I follow a simple rule. I never invest or spend money just because someone says it is a good opportunity. I check the details first, start small, and only use money I can afford to lose.

That mistake was painful, but it taught me better money discipline.

[goldkingcoiner]

The biggest financial mistake was investing in altcoins. The second biggest was leveraging Bitcoin by trading derivatives likes futures and options (especially futures). Today I consider both nothing but gambling and bad gambling at that (since it was not even entertaining).

Now I stick with Bitcoin and DCA. And I do not panic sell or panic buy.

It is important to find a good strategy and stick with it. Any veteran Bitcoiner on this forum will say DCAing Bitcoin is really the best thing they have done ever since learning about trading and Bitcoin.

Although DCA is still good for non-Bitcoin financial instruments like stocks.

[davis196]

My biggest financial mistakes are:
1.Not investing the money in my bank account and just letting them sit there and getting devalued by inflation.
2.Not HODLing my Bitcoins long enough to sell them at the 125K USD ATH, which occurred last year. I've had around 1.25 BTC back in 2015.
3.Panic selling BTC several times in the last 10 years. Also selling a bunch of shitcoins I've got back in 2017 at lower prices.
4.Getting scammed by random people on Discord.
5.Wasting several hundred dollars for buying ads and traffic on a platform named 7search back in 2015.
6.Wasting the equivalent of several thousand euro for my university education. I've got a university diploma, that is totally useless to me.
7.Gambling and sports betting can be counted as a financial mistake as well.

[slapper]

Your story is universal and resonates. As in all human interactions with uncertainty and time constraints. You were not a greedy person, you were a human being. Greed is simply the word we say after the event, for why we did not do what we never knew we had to do.

There is that moment when the pain is so overwhelming that it becomes more comfortable to distract yourself than it is to bear the pain. Even if "anything" means locking in the exact outcome you were afraid of. It is completely irrational and also completely predictable.

After years of making all sorts of mistakes over and over again, what I discovered is that the mistake is not necessarily problem. The issue here is the story we tell ourselves about mistakes. That we should have known. That we were careless. That some smarter people do not do this. But, they do. Everyone does.

The market dropping now and triggering this memory for you. That is actually useful. You have already been through it. So YOU that are sitting here today are a better version than the panicking YOU who sold. That is the actual return on the mistake. You just cannot see it on a chart.