How much money do you figure you've wasted in your lifetime? The winner gets a CD I bought and hated.

-- Anonymous, October 12, 2000

Answers

By now? $50,000 at least, much of it when I was in HS and spent my work money on any damn thing that caught my fancy for five minutes instead of saving it like someone intelligent. Even more when I decided in college that it would be fun to have a lot of clothes. Why? I only wear the same six things every week. What was I thinking?!?

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2000

You know, I stopped thinking of it as waste. Probably the best move my husband and I made was to take three years after our marriage to have fun. We were both working, lived in an apartment, and just decided to enjoy it for awhile. Ate out all the time, bought what we wanted, and just lived fairly frivolously. THEN we scrimped and saved for a house, had a child, and started the retirement/insurance/important grownup stuff. It was wonderful!

I watched so many of our acquaintances get married and immediately buy a house, cars, have kids, and burden themselves with responsibilities. Some of them are making it, a lot of them didn't. The stress about money is hard to manage.

My husband recently squandered a lot of money in the stock market. He had mucho stock options from a previous employer, and he basically blew all the profits on bad investments. We could've fought about it and I could've resented it, but you know what? His family has a strong risk-taking streak, and he's been fighting that urge for a long time, just because I am completely risk-averse (I won't even buy a lottery ticket). So, I just mentally put aside that money as never really existing, and there's no harm done. I don't think it was a wasted experience, just an expensive one.

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2000

Does my undergraduate degree count?

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2000

Well,I've worked since I've been about 13 or 14 and I never really worked for anything I needed. That is, my parents paid for my back to school clothes, housing, etc. So from 13-18, let's say I made $8,000, on average. That's $40,000. I've worked part-time in a bar almost my entire career, say that's another $10,000 a year for like five years, so that's $50,000. And I've wasted money that I've made at my real job, too. So over $100,000? It's not as depressing as it sounds, though.

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2000

I don't feel I've ever wasted any money, but in all honesty I probably wouldn't have a dime to my name if it weren't for my wife. She's cautious and penny-wise, and thinks about the future. She and I were raised very differently. She's a halfbreed northern Cheyenne from the rez in Montana and I'm a happy-go-lucky cracker from Texas, and while my family isn't super-rich, we always had what we needed. Her Scotch-Irish surveyor father and Indian mom moved around from highway job to highway job for years before he went to work for an engineering firm and I think that made her less secure about things. I'm not bitter about any money-matter that I can think of. I'm not a "regretter" by nature...it's a waste of time.

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2000

All of it.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2000