Sunk cost fallacy with regards to relationships. The main argument for remaining in a not-so-hot relationship should not be focused around how much time you’ve put in already and that breaking up would make you feel like you wasted that part of your life. Adding more months/years to the total is the wasteful part!
Loaning money to friends and family. Co-signing for loans for friends and family. Until I started watching Judge Judy, I didn’t realize how much of this was happening, and just how bad an idea it is. Here’s your first clue - all the banks and credit loaners think this person is a bad risk, but you know better than they do? No, you don’t.
As for loaning to friends and family, people here have good guidelines for that - never loan more than you can afford to lose, because you’re likely to lose either the money or the friendship (or both).
I blame Hollywood and TVLand for a lot of that - we see so many incredibly unrealistic portrayals of long-term relationships that it’s hardly any wonder that people have such screwed-up ideas about what love is and isn’t.
[QUOTE=Doctor Jackson]
Stats show that living together before marriage is a mistake, or at least leads to lower marital satisfaction and higher divorce rates.
[/QUOTE]
And I’ll be willing to bet it’s because of the people who moved in together because “it’s not like it’s a commitment”, wind up getting married because breaking up and untangling your life is too much of a hassle, then get divorced because shit just got real.
Or even just the people (and these are men usually) who wanted the sex to keep going, so they moved in, then got the marriage ultimatum and couldn’t face dealing with the mess they made of their lives.
People who make the decision to get married before moving in together are probably also mature enough to call of the wedding in the event of surprise necrophilia/mayonnaise incompatibility/violence/whatever.
But that, again, is just my very judgmental view on things.
Cosigning is cool if you understand you are just as responsible for the debt. My dad consigned for me on some college loans and it really helped me get an education I wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise.
Agree with the loan thing. Once loaned a friend 800 bucks for a laptop and now I am 800 bucks and one friend poorer. But oddly I didn’t really ever care if I got the 800 back. I asked a few times to start working out a payment plan and he said he would but never happened and we just drifted apart. No big hard feelings though
I have a friend who, before I met her, had a marriage that ended in divorce, and later lived with a man, and they bought a house together. (She never had children.) The divorce was not amicable, but the split with the man she lived with was messier and more painful than her divorce, just because of that house.
And Anaamika, I agree with you about “having kids without thinking it through”. Now, I realize nobody ever knows what they’re getting into when they have children, no matter how many they already have, but having children with a partner who doesn’t want them (or another), or never discussing it before you get married, or thinking that pregnancy will make a man stop drinking, gambling, womanizing, playing video games, etc. is a disaster waiting to happen.
Honestly, when I was in college, I knew several men who said they planned to treat their wives poorly after the kids arrived, so he would be a divorced dad. :eek: One of them had to live with his family briefly in a homeless shelter after his dad left, and I asked him, “Why would you want to do that to your own kids?” His answer? “Dad had a 17-year-old girlfriend.”
:smack:
That’s a good point, and I think that’s where the logic falls down - I think Anaamika is right about this, that people just don’t think; they don’t imagine what the consequences of yoking themselves to this person and this debt could be.
Re my earlier post: Forgot to mention that my friend’s split with the man she lived with was amicable and a mutual decision.
I’m fully aware that I’m not the norm, and honestly, if my daughter did what I did, I’d have a fit! On the other hand, I don’t see where my anecdote is any more or less valid than those of people who did live together and decided to marry or not marry. I had a coworker who married the very weekend he and his wife met, and they were at 40+ years when I knew him. I knew people who lived together, then married and were together decades later. And I knew people who lived together, married, and divorced within months.
Based on my admittedly limited experiences, I can’t see where living together has any special value either way. Not that it matters - no one will do what I say anyway.
To answer the OP: taking up smoking.
I work at a university. You would not believe how many 18-21 year-olds I see smoking. This is not the 1930s; everyone and their pet rat is well-aware of the dozens of health problems smoking causes. Dumbasses, every one of them.
Same goes for tanning.
People are WAY too optimistic in the wrong contexts. I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer, nor do I think that hopes and dreams are bad things - but it irks me when I read a story about some liberal arts graduate of East Buttfuck Private University who takes out $150,000 in loans and complains that the system failed them because they can’t find a job that pays enough to repay the loan. College is way overpriced for sure, but if you’re going to need a job at Goldman Sachs to pay off your loans, you’d better find a school and major that leads you there.
It’s the same impulse that fools people into behaving as if their homes or investment portfolios will appreciate into perpetuity, or into thinking that they can marry people they just met and they’ll stay together, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. I guess it’s kind of an offshoot of the current American zeitgeist of individual exceptionalism.
This.
As it is election season where I live:
Voting without getting informed on the issues and the candidate’s stance on those issues.
Douglas Adams wrote about the problem in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish.
If you cannot be bothered to make an informed vote then we just end up with the same people doing the same crap in elected office.
People who drive the speed limit in the left lane.
It irks me and I don’t even drive yet! Seriously, the place to drive the speed limit is the right lane.
If it were the case that people learned from their mistakes in love, one would expect that second marriages would break up less than first ones. Instead, just the opposite is true - second marriages break up even more than first ones.
Regards,
Shodan
Having sex with a person you have recently divorced/seperated from. This must happen a lot, because I know 3 people with kids who post-date their breakup. Why did you put your dick in the woman who stabbed you with a fork because she thought you stole her whiskey? No rubber? Seriously? Dude, what’s wrong with you? Have fun with that child support payment
Living in misery rather than moving. Unemployed, no chance of a job in their field, renting, no kids. Perfect candidates for economic migration. They won’t have it. They went to school here, the weather’s nice, their relatives live here. You can’t have it both ways, quit whining.
Paying/borrowing full price for an expensive private college, for no good reason. If you are brilliant, get a scholarship to MIT or somewhere. If you are just some schmo with a passable SAT score and no clue of a major, go to the fucking state university until you have some idea what you want to do. That’s where normal people go. The parents are at least half the problem. The “experience” and “networking” at St. Fancypants University is not worth bankrupting yourself and going eyeball deep in debt. Stop pretending you are wealthy.
Pushing your kids into high level sports competition, to the detriment of their education. He’s not the next Tiger Woods or Andre Agassi, he’s just a jock. Since you’ve neglected his intellectual development, he’ll only ever amount to being a used up old jock. Even if Junior doesn’t blow out his knee, he stands more chance of being killed by a falling coconut than going professional in any meaningful way. You are not going to be able to quit your job because of your boy’s ball-playing money.
Related to these: accumulating credit card debt. Especially if it’s on entertainment or other non-necessities. Spending money that you don’t actually have is, except in certain special circumstances, stupid. Is that restaurant meal or new pair of shoes really worth taking out a loan for?
I am an absolute cynic when it comes to people and their money.
This applies to Rent-To-Own places, CC debt, houses or apartments they can’t afford and viewing one’s savings account as an “optional” program that you put money in once in a great while if ever.
Also, not contributing to your 401k plan if you got one. I had a coworker of mine actually tell me he doesn’t bother with 401k because he could only afford to put $50 a paycheck in. :smack:
Thankfully, I was able to convince him free money is free money no matter how small the amount. Heck, for my first couple of years I was only doing $20 a check.
Enrolling your 2-5 year-olds in activities that require you to purchase gear. They will either outgrow the gear in 6 months or tire of the activity in 6 weeks. Or 6 minutes.
My jaw still drops open when I think about the leotard, tutu, tap shoes, ballet shoes and “dance bag” my SIL bought for my 2.5-year-old niece. She didn’t last half a class.
That’s a good one. I honestly don’t understand why anyone is still starting this nasty, dangerous addiction at this point.
That’s a good one, too - you hear people telling other people so often, “You can do it if you just keep trying and believe hard enough.” No, actually, sometimes you can’t (see: American Idol). If you can’t sing, you can’t have a career as a singer. Same with dancing, modelling, acting, etc. Your parents haven’t done you any favours, telling you that you’re great when you just aren’t.
That one makes me wonder. Go somewhere else, get some experience, move back when a job opening comes up. It might not be ideal, but if someone told you all of your life was going to be ideal, they were lying.
This is one of the things I find fascinating about the US - the idea that just going to your local college/university isn’t good enough, and people actually caring where you got your degree in whatever. Weird.