Best decision and worst decision.

longleggedhair

Probably the best was paying £140,000 for a house in 2000, everyone thought I was insane for paying such a high price, I had it valued recently & calculated it’s gone up by £1000 a month since I moved in, and having a tracker mortgage which has cost me virtually nothing since 2008 as it tracked the base rate.

More recently ignoring Martins advice last year and taking a fixed rate at last Octobers price cap, it looks like that will save me several thousand pounds.

The worst buying shares in Northern Rock & RBS. 

The_Fat_Controller

Best - Using my full PEP and ISA allowances every year since they came into being.

Worst - Hardly worth mentioning though, selling the shares I inherited when my father passed away when I did not actually need the money at all.

bostonerimus

Best decision was to pay voluntary NI when I left the UK in the late 1980s.

Worst decision was to buy some individual shares in the dividend reinvestment schemes of 3M, IBM and Johnson Controls. I didn’t lose money, but it was a pain to administer.

veryintrigued

Best - paying off a mortgage when rates meant that I really shouldn't have and instead should have saved the money elsewhere instead looking from a short-term finance perspective.

Worst - Leeds United sharea

talexuser

Best getting on the property ladder straight after university (no longer possible for most now?)
Best paying off the mortgage in less than 10 years when young. It enabled moving up the ladder without further mortgages and freeing up money to learn about investing in the early 1990s and putting the maximum in PEPs and ISAs the vast majority of years since then. 
Best having a final salary pension scheme (no longer available).
Best going to university when it was free (no longer available)
Best all the free privatisation and demutualisation shares, but....
Worst hanging on to Northern Rock too long until worthless.
Is life really better for young people now?

eskbanker

This may sound cheesy, but my best decision was to sign up to a certain popular personal finance forum many years ago, from which I've learned so much, and taken control of my finances, especially investing in ISAs and pensions - too many well-informed posters to namecheck and thank individually but the wealth of knowledge shared on here is easily underestimated.

Like the above poster, hanging onto windfall shares (Halifax) until practically worthless would rank towards the wrong end of the scale....

Albermarle

This may sound cheesy, but my best decision was to sign up to a certain popular personal finance forum many years ago, from which I've learned so much, and taken control of my finances, 

Yes I will add this to my 'good decisions' as well, although maybe spend a bit too much time on it !

sebtomato

Retireby40 said:

Hello everyone,

This is just a thread that may help the newer or younger investors/savers starting out as there's a lot of experienced investors on the forum that we could learn from.

What was your best decision in terms of savings/finance/investing?

What was your biggest mistake? 

Best decisions:

• Never spending my full income (saving each month), always have a standard of living years behind my increasing income
• Started investing in a private pension from the age of 25
• Buying a property
  
• Investing "blindly" each month on the stock market (on a selection of well diversified tracker ETFs/funds), regardless of market conditions
  
• Getting a new fixed rate mortgage 2 years ago larger than what was actually required, to get access to cheap money that could be invested for a higher return

Worst decisions:

• Renting for way longer than necessary (fear of committing to buying a place)
• Staying way too long with expensive fund platforms, like HL, due to high fees
  
• Buying actively "managed" funds on such platforms (pretty much regretted it every time)
• Trusting P2P lenders about the actual security of their loans
• Investing in Bitcoin (small amount), despite knowing it was not really worth anything and it's heavily manipulated

 

barnstar2077

Best:
Buying a house at 24.
Taking pensions seriously earlier than other people my age.

Worst:
Had a bit of a silly moment at about 30 and borrowed 10k spending money from mortgage company.  Certainly not the end of the world, but I shouldn't have done it.

LHW99

Best, ignoring the FA's recommendation of a "managed fund" in my AVC 30+ years ago, and investing instead into something called an "overseas technical fund" that did a lot better.

Worst, not selling my Bradford & Bingley shares when I sold our DD's holding - they went bust a few months later.