When buying a house people tell you to make sure the roof is in good condition because that’ll be expensive to replace. What they don’t tell you is that is all the other things that you may need to replace and how expensive they are. Fence, paint, siding, water heater, washer/dryer, AC, heater, kitchen appliances, etc. Some this might show up in the inspection report, but it’s hard to get a good idea of what it’ll cost beforehand. Also your realtor will have an incentive to downplay any problems to get the deal done.
Home warranties are universally a scam. It was talked about pretty much every week on the Reddit homeowners forum. Just week after week someone getting scammed.
For one, they’ll fight tooth and nail not replace things. When there is absolutely no way that heater can be patched up and run a little longer they’ll replace it with the cheapest heater possible using the cheapest HVAC guy possible.
College only makes sense economically if you have a plan.
If you’re a naive, idealistic, scatterbrained, autistic, traumatized, brainiac redneck raised into terrible character by a spineless single parent who drove off the good one, like I was, then your best bet after high school is some entry level job, heath insurance, and therapy for a few years.
I was like “sweet! big journey!” and the kids from healthier backgrounds and I got along fine, and they got their shit done and I mostly tore my hair out and cried and took super long walks and experimented with drugs. I had been led to believe that the journey through life was like driving through a country. I didn’t realize that traveling in this journey meant transforming the self. I had no conception of self transformation as an aspect of life, of directed growth, of evolving consciously. All I had was this feeling that life was like a river and I was kayaking down it seeing new stuff.
I don’t really know how to say what the lesson was. It was the most expensive lesson I ever learned, because not only did it cost me a huge amount of money, it also cost me about twenty years of my life.
I have similar experience with you, and boy do I waste so much money on that. Wish I could afford therapy, because managing myself emotionally was a long, expensive and heartbreaking experience I wish I could skip over.
After having 3500 dollars worth of stuff stolen by my shit landlord. I went to court. Again And again And again And again.
Not accounting for my time, gas, parking, I spent over 5000.amd even after I “won” I still wound up goj back to court several times because this scum sucking asshole claims to be 100000 in debt to the government.
I hate the legal system more then I hate the guy who stole from me!
This is a great point and an important lesson: part of what makes scams so appealing is that they stroke your ego. A lot of them rely on the mark believing they’re somehow better and different than all the people who got swindled, ignoring the fact that there is no correlation between all the victims besides “they all participated in this scam.”
For example, a lot of sleight-of-hand gamers will let other marks see the sleight of hand while someone is playing. This makes them feel like they’re in on the secret and can’t be fooled by the scammer. What they fail to realize is that the first mark was actually in on it, and the scam happens off the table when you get pickpocketed, or other plants in the crowd “accidentally” jostle you distracting you from the table, or the 6’8", 320 lbs guy named Tinkerbell with the brass knuckles is suddenly very insistent that you must be cheating to win so much and you owe homeboy his money back (and some crowd members are even saying they saw you cheat???)
Scams above all rely on controlling the environment. If you “see through it and know how to come out on top” no you don’t, and no you won’t; it’s almost certainly just another layer of the scam.
Fuck, all of this is depresing to read. I havent had had any mayor fuck ups like the ones in here so my only contribution would be to not lean into bathroom sinks since they are not as firm as they look, not even if they are welded to the floor via concrete, just wash your hands or your teeth or shave or wathever away from the sink, since the motherfucker breaks easly.
Our mortgage brokers, we had a broker that told us it would be best to go with variable because you always end up paying less. We had a choice between 1.35% variable or 2.05% fixed. We had 1.35% for 2 months and it is 6.1% now. We could be putting so much against our principal but instead we are paying 3k+ in interest and 1200 in principal.