I don’t know if this counts as a “financial” deal, but as a young 18-year-old serviceman I got suckered by a 3-card-monte con. 3 times at $20 each. I’m thankful it wasn’t more.
A friend offered to get me invested with Madoff in the early 90s. Dodged a bullet there.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. If they are worth lending the money, and you have it, just give it to them. You will feel much better about it. Consider it a gift if they pay you back.
I gave a friend some money after high school to fix his windshield. Someone bashed it in and he was broke and needed the car to get to work. I wasn’t doing well financially myself, but I had enough to help. I lended him the money. Later he refused to give it back and we got into a blowout. I told my dad about the situation and asked his advice. He asked how much? I told him $200. He smiled and said I paid very little for a very good lesson.I forgave the friend as the money wasn’t worth the friendship, but things were never the same.
I got suckered on my current vehicle as I was in a pinch and needed a vehicle fast. I am paying DOUBLE the monthly payment I should be at $380/month for a Toyota Carolla LEASE. The person that sold it was my girlfriends sister (turns out she is poison, but that is another story).
Think long and hard about any investment. If it is something you are being rushed into it is probably a bad idea.
While I have made some bad financial decisions, I wouldn’t say that I’ve been suckered into any of them. To me, that implies some kind of deception or coercion.
Merely buying a stock that goes bad doesn’t make me a sucker because stocks can go bad for all kinds of reasons. A recent example was a stock my investing club bought into because it had a chance to dominate its market and grow quickly. Oops… some competitors marginalized its position and the value went down. That’s just life. (By contract, Enron was providing false and fraudulent information. Buyers who trusted that information were suckered into it.)
Maybe the closest thing that counts was a small media production company. I didn’t put in a lot of money, but did devote a ton of time as the accountant. The creative types in the company were all jazzed about doing profitable commercial video/media work to fund creative projects. (Commercial work being like a 30-second TV advertisement or a corporate training video). They did very little work of any sort. Mostly they liked to debate fictitious profit-sharing contracts on movies they would make some day. However, even when pursuing a million dollars of funding for a creative project, they did such a half-assed job on the proposal and budget that it was obvious they weren’t serious about any of it. In the end, I was out about 200 hours of unpaid labor and $2,000 of investment.
My wife’s parents lost everything in the Enron debacle. They both no longer work and are, aside from meagre Social Security, quite penniless.
Did they work for Enron? I can’t imagine having all your investments tied up with them unless you work for them. Studying as an accountant for years it is interesting to hear of someone being burnt by Enron outside of the academic environment. It puts a personal touch on how important it is to be an honest accountant. Peoples financial lives are depending on your honesty.
And you only have to buy 4 more in the next two weeks!!
My brother-in-law worked for an investment company that turned out to be pretty dodgy. We lost a couple of thousand dollars.
I bought a bunch of beef off the back of a pickup truck that was driving through my neighborhood looking for dipshits. Well, he found one. The meat was awful and the different “steaks” seemed to be “meat” cut into the proper “shapes” of Tbone, Strip, Fillet etc… Couldn’t even use it for stew or tacos it was so bad. Reminded me of those old dog treats that looked like fake beef made of playdough. I got bonus tallapias though!
Spent $250 on a bunch of garbage meat. Yep, did that. Wife likes to bring it up once in a while.
Thankfully never having a lot of money I have never lost a major amount of money, but i am still resentful about getting one of those high pressure sales in the mall to buy their stupid lotion. At least I resisted “buying two for my friends!” And that lotion was redonkulously expensive, too.
Right now my coworkers owe me money and it would make me resent them if I hadn’t decided to just take a deep breath and let water flow under the bridge. But I won’t forget. I bought the birthday gift for another coworker, at an agreed-upon price, and now I have to eat about half of it (instead of just a fifth). I won’t be making that mistake again.
Got talked into one of those travel clubs where you pay them a few thousand up front and then a yearly subscription. They, allegedly, provide free to cheap international vacations. We were about to marry and my soon-to-be wife really wanted this. Yes, I’m blaming her for this one. We never took a single trip.
No, never. I am financially risk averse to such a state that I have passed on very conservative investments. Simply considering riskier investments is enough to make me break out in hives.
Yeah, I voted for Obama.
ZING!!!
That’s surprising that you had such a bad experience buying meat off the back of a pickup.
I can’t think of any specific instance when I was ever “suckered”. I suppose a big part of it is that I tend to be very conservative financially, am pretty educated on financial matters, and truly believe there is no such thing as a free lunch. If someone is trying to sell me on getting rich quick, I have to assume they have some ulterior motive besides making me wealthy.
One of my friends, not so much. Every few years, I get a call out of the blue from him about some MLM scheme he just heard about. He is literally the sort of guy who pays money to the Russian mob to buy a stripper out of her “debt” so he can marry her and then gets stuck with half of her village living in his house.
Yeah, I’m married
I got roped into Amway as a teenager.
Is my sarcasm detector broken? All of those meat deals are terrible. I knew someone who bought $250 of meat (a deal at just $2 a pound!) and found that it was 1) freezer burned and 2) very low quality… maybe not even select grade. They wound up feeding a lot of it to their pets.
Frankly, even the name-brand meat deals like Omaha Steaks are ridiculously overpriced for what you get.
Yes. 
I don’t want to think about it anymore. Been there done that & want no more. :eek:
I had lunch with my old boss, shortly after he left the firm for which we both had been working for about six months. This was about ten years ago.
He told me to get every single thing the firm promised in writing or they would rip me off. I didn’t listen.
Cost me a couple thousand and a good deal of self-respect.
Regards,
Shodan
People who got in in the early 90s probably did quite well!
Only once, back in the 80s, when I bought a penny stock for a company called BMAX that supposedly was coming out with a revolutionary new printer head. I bought 300 shares or so and watched the value start dropping. The fucking guy calls me and wants me to buy more shares because “it’s really going to take off in the next few days!” I passed. Lost it all.
My cousin worked for the local electric company, which got bought out by Enron. He wanted to convert all his shares to Enron stock, and the company was high-pressuring all employees to do so. His ex-wife, a much smarter person, said “Hey, half those shares belong to me and I’ll take it in cash, thank you.” She was the smart one. Instead of retiring, the shlub is still working in his mid-70s.
Not exactly suckered, but bad advice from people who had a good point and meant well.
I had 5000 to invest around '95. I knew tech companies pretty well , and knew the internet was going to be huger. I did really well for a couple years and got it near 200k on paper.
Then I got really nervous as most the companies were being acquired by venture firms that seemed to have no plan. I mentioned my plan to several intelligent, successful, older investors I knew, And everyone of them said “Don’t try to time the market. Keep your money in or you’ll make a mistake and regret it”
I decided to listen to them and just kept it in through the crash. Then I got depressed about the money I had “lost” and kept leaving it in to chase my losses like a drunk gambler.
Although the advice they gave was sound historically, I realized later my uncomfortableness of discussing actual numbers when it comes to money really screwed me hard. I figured out that when I said my stocks had done well they were probably thinking I was up 30-40% and was getting edgy. Because as older, conservative guys they didn’t have a context for stocks going up 10000% in a year. I know now, if I had given the real numbers they would have told me to follow my instincts and move a bunch out of the sector.