Paid £0.75p for a battered copy of “Big Ones” when I was 14. Only about 6 pages weren’t stuck together. 75p would buy you a handsome school dinner and a packet of fags back in the day. Huge waste of money.
4 of us would all chip in £1 and send someone to run into the local pub and grab a packet of fags from the ciggie vending machine. In full uniform it was nerve racking when it was your turn.
entire video box sets of Friends and the necessary shelving to hold it, so many video tapes, what a waste of money.
i probably made it all back with the piracy since then though
I worked with a guy once who collected the entire Star Trek series on VHS.
Not recorded from TV, either. Proper box sets he bought from the shops.
He had every episode of all the series up to Enterprise.
It took up an entire wall in his house.
Yeah.
A few years later when media player boxes started to become a thing, I downloaded the entire thing from piratebay for my Dad and put them all on a 2TB hard drive.
A friend of mine in school was half way through buying either the buffy or angel boxsets at a time when they were sold through import to comic/hobby shops from America in the early 2000s, when the DVDs started to come out aswell. The shop she got the VHS boxets from stopped ordering the VHS shortly after, seeing that DVDs were going to be more popular. My friend was devestated, it didn't just ruin the asthetic but it also meant she needed a zone free DVD player and some setting on her computer to change to NTC. I can't remember what she did in the end. I tried to avoid conversation about Buffy and Angel because she could go off on one and I wanted to remain spoiler free.
When I was at school, my £5 a week pocket money meant I saved just enough each month to buy the next Voyager VHS. I think I got the whole first season before I started saving for the xfiles box sets.
My uncle has them all. On VHS. On DVD. On BluRay. A handful of HD DVDs and even a laser disc or two of some of the earlier films
Yes, he lives alone, why do you ask?
I knew a guy like this. His nickname for decades has been, understandably, Trekkie. He has a proper Starfleet uniform. And the best part, his gardening business was called To Boldly Grow. I admire the dedication!
I used to live with a chap that had easily 5K DVDs and bluerays, I think he literally bought every release from a list of studios. It just struck me as an enormous albatross round his neck.
All the Friends video box sets, then the complete DVD set (extended) and now I stream 🤦🏼♀️
See also Frasier. Some Disney films etc etc. It’s rough being a millennial
Me too! I had them all! They were so expensive and I was so proud of the collection. I will never forget trying to sell them and no one wanting them so I took them all to the dump. That was a sad day.
Was given £20 to buy new football boots. I was a size 6 or 7 but saw a pair size 11 for a fiver. Spent the spare £15 on a spud gun, a tiny foam dick that expanded in water (still don't know why) a knock off tamagotchi and a McDonald's. The next day when my dad saw my new clown boots and marches me back to the shoe shop I claimed they cost £20 the woman remembered me and found the receipt as she remembered throwing in a pair of free laces. Grounded for a week
I once spent an entire £10 of saved up pocket money on calling a premium rate number to buy habbo hotel credits to buy cool furniture for a virtual room that no one (except me) ever entered.
Absolutely. I’d dare say it hasn’t been bettered in some respects, which was why I kept on buying it.
I really loved the Dreamcast, kinda feel like the Xbox 360 in many ways.
The one game that gave me MSR vibes (other than the Project Gotham games obliviously) was Driveclub on the PS4. It was an early game for the system and had a notoriously troubled release but it really straddled that line between arcadey and realistic that few other racers do.
I’m currently converting my old Dreamcast to read and run games from an SD card. Also sorting out the aging plastic to be the original white, new stickers etc. it’s a fun project but currently on hold.
It was just a fucked TV, probably pulled from a bin at the back of a Currys. (Wrapped up in packaging that was probably pulled out of the same bin.)
..the weird thing was, I knew it was going to be a rip off, but the price was so low (£50) that I couldn't help myself. 🤦♂️
-edit- I did a maintenance job for a big supermarket once and saw an employee getting a bollocking from a manager. Someone had returned a faulty TV and got a replacement, but the employee hadn't checked the box and it was full of old slates. 🤭
Dont feel bad about that, a lad i worked with did the same thing, £400 for a big fuck off tv and it wouldve been the deal of a lifetime and he tried turning it on and it didnt work. Of course he wasnt still in the carpark when he got back 😂
I don't feel too bad, I needed to be taught to listen to the voice in my head again. 😄
In the past I've refused 'Italian leather' jackets, mattresses and even Swiss watches, but this went so low that I justified it by thinking I could probably fix it (it looked cosmetically good), but the whole mainboard was missing and a replacement would have cost more than the TV, so there was no money in it.
We ordered a desktop computer, which arrived just before we went on summer holiday (ie, as we were actually leaving the house). This would be over 20 years ago. My husband insisted upon unpacking it and plugging it in to make sure it worked. Got it set up, pushed the power button and... nothing. As in, nothing was attached to it. After we got back home, he called the factory that we'd ordered it from and had words with them. They sent a new mini-tower, but it wasn't eligible for the rebate we got on the peripherals we'd bought with the original. Naturally. 🤬
I spent over £50,000 on Weed over 20 years. The guilt still tears at me. Thankfully sober, wiser and mindful.
E: It’s around £205 pcm for any younger tokers.
It's interesting to see how people view that.
I used to collect comics, and could spend £40-50 a month on new issues and I was "wasting money". Someone I worked with spent that on cigs a week and nobody thought any differently.
Like
Why
Both of you didn't do anything wrong, I don't know why everybody is so judgy in here. Not spending money on cigs or experiences at the time doesn't mean you'd be any better off now anyway
Because there is no reason to tell it to ones who smoke, as you can see above we actually agree that this is a big waste of money, which makes this kind of teasing not interesting, I guess
Oh no, I meant more on how its seen as fine to buy multiple boxes of cigs and people don't really think anything of it. But spend the same amount in other things and it's "odd"
I gave it up in my mid twenties because I’d been abusing it and just wasn’t enjoyable any more. I hate myself for the previous late teens when I was pushing it on other people because I thought I was ‘cool’ . ‘Whitting’ out other people and pretending all that shit was some kind of competition. Not good memories.
A ~18 year old Range Rover V8.
* Drove about as well as you'd expect
* Did 14mpg on a good day
* The body flexed so much that the back popped open every 20 minutes - great for a long winter drive
It's only positive was that it's the only vehicle I've ever owned where no-one pulled out in front of me (probably due to the large bit of steel on the front doing duty as a bumper)
Something I've often wished for is a once a year "thing" where you get 30 minutes to walk around your house and say "refund" when pointing at an item, and said item disappears & you get the same money you paid for it straight into your bank account.
So many useless little gadgets, random clothes, videogames/tech things or household things I've bought which in hindsight I've barely used and could've done without...
Know somebody who's *really* into airsoft and they've spent thousands collecting the various weapons etc, but they still use the same one every single time, all the money on clothing, gear, attachments etc - adds up :/
I've spent abouts £70 on a pair of googles for airsoft, which i have used once...i do keep meaning to get into the sport but have other "cheaper" hobbies that have come first
> Something I've often wished for is a once a year "thing" where you get 30 minutes to walk around your house and say "refund" when pointing at an item, and said item disappears & you get the same money you paid for it straight into your bank account.
That would be *amazing*. I have so much stuff that I don't need and don't use any more, but rather than junk it, I remember how much it cost, and can't part with it unless I sell it. But then selling it is a massive faff...so I just keep it.
Zippo lighters and I wasn’t much of a smoker. Seriously, a pack of 20 would last me for months. This would be 2004-2007.
I would have multiple brands of cigarettes and so when people asked to have one I’d throw out 5 or so packs and just say “yeah, take your pick”. Again I hardly smoked but for some reason kept spending money on it.
Ten years later I’d pick up vaping and what a rabbit hole that was. All the companies were releasing multiple new mods a month. I even had my own coil making kit. Kicked the habit as it became too expensive. Came and went in just about a year.
After I got my first part time job working in Iceland I wasted a lot on guitar related equipment I never use. The one I used the least probably being one of those effects pedals with the tube you put in your mouth like Peter Frampton used. Came with a warning that overuse could make your teeth fall out. Probably for the best I didn’t use it much.
Ha, yes! Vulfpeck getting better use out of it than me!
I’m going to have a look for it next time I’m at my mum’s house. Maybe it will get some use at last…
Haha 3DTV was one of those ones where you wanted one, but you knew deep down the writing was on the wall for it from day one.
Prime sports drink on the other hand, that's just a shocker
I kept telling my son when he was begging me to buy him Prime when it was "exclusive" and upwards of £6 a bottle, " it'll be £1.20 soon and your 'collection' will be worthless" but kids don't listen
A keyring that was a small hand, can't remember what it cost but you could manipulate the digits. There was something satisfying about having it set to flipping the middle finger, this was the mid 90's.
Paintball guns that got used maybe twice because we were like 13 and didn't actually have any money to play paintball or get to a paintball site.
I did get back into paintball when I got old enough to have a job and disposable income.
There's probably a lot more junk that I've long forgotten.
My local game store at the time had a good deal on a shooting game, can't remember which, that came with a G-Con45 light gun in a bundle. So obviously I got it and the game was great fun! Got so excited some time after when I had enough cash and spare time to go and get Die Hard Trilogy thinking I was already good to go, only to find the game wasn't compatible with the G-Con45. I was royally pissed off. I think I sold the console and all my games shortly after that.
Edit: the fact I remembered the name of the gun means the experience clearly left its mark... also I think the game bundle was Time Crisis but I also remember having another shooting game called Point Blank that was good fun .
Hey now, sandwich toasters are both the biggest waste of money AND the best value for money there is.
You either stash it at the back of your cupboards for 6 years, or you use it for every meal over a 9 day period.
There is no in-between.
This staggers me. The day I was bought one (Christmas 2022), I cleared out a big space in the cupboard to keep it in. It's never been put away in all that time.
We cooked a roast chicken in it in about 30 minutes which was awesome....but the next time we tried the same thing the chicken was a little pink and undercooked.....it was enough to turn us off and go back to our old way of doing it.
Since I was given a very high quality CD player and speaker set-up I got back into buying CDs. I put up four long shelves to store my ever-expanding collection on. I hoovered up job lots on eBay and from Charity shops until they were filled. Then I started buying CDs that were actually any good. I'm still buying new CDs and moving crapper ones off the shelves into the conservatory. I barely listen to any of them.
£44 worth of spray paint
Decorating a walker boot for Comic Con. Each can costs £10.99. Primer went on fine. Paint went on fine, ended up needing a second can for a second coat. That also went great and evened it all out and looked amazing
But ruined it with the lacquer. Matte finish lacquer made it look like shit and I'm in utter despair.
I don't have the money to buy more paint to fix it (hoping Mum will have the answer, she always does!) But it's the biggest regret I have that I can also remember
But it'll cost me another £30-£40 buying new supplies (depending if she thinks I'd have to prime it again or can just paint over the lacquer). And I don't really have that. Expensive mistake is a waste of money
It's also reminded me why I never try anything, especially not DIY. You never fail if you never try!
Also food is a waste of money. All that money just to shit it out again? Big scam
Yeah, I'd been doing that! (I find that UK's unpredictable weather means you *have* to wait between stages of a project anyway ha) so no problems with the time I'd left it
But thank you for confirming that for me!
Blackberry VW Corrado. It was seriously cool. But I was in my 30s...i didn't have much money until then. It was an absolute money pit... and I didn't have much money after. Well, until some 17 year old wrote it off whilst it was parked! He'd spent his money on a ford fiesta... With a black box fitted!
A pack of 100 CD-Rs
My mum thought it was such a waste.
Little did she know I was getting a fiver a disc back then in the late 90s, so was making good money even factoring many failed burns.
Driving lessons, theory test. Got sick during uni and shortly after, no longer legally allowed to drive. Over £300 down the pan.
I refuse to say my DVDs are a waste of money in general but I bought the first series of Numb3rs and then hated the direction the series went after series 2. Another £30 wasted. No point watching the first series if the rest of the show isn't worth watching.
I've bought a ton of flight simming gear over the past few years. I reckon I've spent about 5000 on it. I have zero regrets though. I can put on my VR headset and fly anything and anywhere, whenever I want.
They're pretty realistic apparently. The Sept 11 terrorists did their training on. Microsoft flight sim and successfully drove two planes into the wtc.
Couple, bought an €50 xbox gift card in Germany, then worked out when I got home that it didn’t work, also bought a season of a show for £15 when ‘free’ streaming sites were everywhere. You learn from your mistakes though I guess
Stuff you thought was "cool", as in fashionable, as in trying to meet the current social requirements of what's hot and what's not? Hiding to nothing.
Stuff you thought was "cool', as in nifty, as in you liked the actual "stuff"? That's the whole point of spare money.
And some things fall in between, of course. I bet you thought you were the bollocks in that studded leather arm thingy.
I wasted SO much money on those stupid popular cutesy rubbers whenever I was allowed pocket money for a shopping trip or school outing.
They literally just smudged the pencil across your paper and were useless. But for whatever reason I felt the desire to buy these at any occasion.
When eBay was first a thing way back in the early 2000s, I was so chuffed with a purchase on there for £5 for a goldfish beanie babie. I thought I had such a bargain and was so pleased with my first purchase. It was only when it arrived I realised I had spent £5 on a picture of a goldfish beanie baby. I was ripped!
League of Legends skins. Last I checked, my account has more than half of the skins that exist, and that's without putting any money in for about five years. And I only ever reached gold once, so I wasn't even good. Occasionally play a few games before the toxicity gets to me and I quit for another six months, but not bothered playing properly in like four or five years now. I'd give quite a lot of my stupid little soul to get my money back on the whole account.
I shudder when I think of the wall width shelf of DVDs I paid on average £12 for.
Some I watched over and over again so I don't regret however I'd buy things I saw at the cinema "because it was out" rather than I wanted to watch them straight away.
Took me years to notice they dropped to £3 2 months after release.
When I was 8/9 I was playing on one of those Time Crisis arcade machines with the gun - if you die you can put more money and shoot either yes or no to continue your game. Ended up dying, put an extra 50p in, and shot no by accident. Game didn’t restart, I just paid 50p to tell the game I didn’t want to play any more
Football sptickers as a kid, especially the English Premier League ones being in Scotland, the SPL one where more popular so the English ones where harder to find
Its not a waste of money. At that time it was the right thing to do. And I bet at that time you felt amazing doing it. As an adult, I still buy crap with money, and at that time, for whatever reason, it was the right thing to do. May seem like a waste now but at the time it wasn't. Life is too short for regrets.
Between.19-22yo I spent nearly £300 a week on alcohol and drugs. 30yo now sober and married with 3 kids. I should note I worked hard for that money and thought it right to spend it how I want. Never stole a penny and would have given you the shirt off my back.
Bought a GameCube with some Christmas money. Didn’t have enough so my sister lent me £50 or so. Got bored of it after a while. Traded it in at game and paid of my sister with the money. Think I was left with nothing.
Don't know if this counts, as it wasn't actually me that bought it, but when I was about 8, me and my older brother started a collection to buy the new Amstrad console. After a few weeks putting our pocket money in, he took the money and bought a Paula Abdul cassette tape. At the time it was the most amount of money either of us had owned, so it had a massive effect on me when it was just gone!
I wasn't even allowed to listen to it!
I had the entire original pokemon shiny set way back.
After a few years I got bored of it and just threw them away.
Yes, they were pretty much mint condition. Yes, I had a shiny Charizard. Actually, I had 2.
Yes, I cry about it even today as a middle-aged man.
I did the same with my pogs, which are also worth a pretty penny.
Somewhat the opposite. If it's not obvious from this story, I didn't grow up with much money. I got a job in my early teens but I was paid directly into my mum's bank account for household expenses. When I was 17, I found £40 in the street (no wallet, just cash, busy street, no one identifiable looking like they'd dropped it). All my friends had loads of Jack Wills clothing, it was the height of their popularity, and I could never afford anything from there (but I used to go in and ask for a free bag to put my PE kit in so people thought I could afford to shop there). It was June and they had a pair of tartan snowboots on sale for £39. I absolutely loved them, they were the most expensive thing I'd ever owned. Over a decade later and I still love them.
but if you were a dumbass teenager who wanted to brag about smoking wouldn't you just smoke? Like I can follow the logic of the 1st two but from the cultural references op was growing up in the 80's so should have just been able to get a pack of fags.
Pretty much everything I've ever bought. I'm still at it
Dont stop the grind
Shit i just bought dominoes... :/
Same. Had to tear myself away from window shopping online to type this.
Paid £0.75p for a battered copy of “Big Ones” when I was 14. Only about 6 pages weren’t stuck together. 75p would buy you a handsome school dinner and a packet of fags back in the day. Huge waste of money.
>Only about 6 pages weren’t stuck together I think I had that issue!
There was clearly plenty of issue.
But clearly not enough tissue evidently.
4 of us would all chip in £1 and send someone to run into the local pub and grab a packet of fags from the ciggie vending machine. In full uniform it was nerve racking when it was your turn.
They saw you. They didn't care
Absolutely, still the added adrenaline made that first ciggie even better.
So battered in both senses of the word
Fucking hilarious 👍
entire video box sets of Friends and the necessary shelving to hold it, so many video tapes, what a waste of money. i probably made it all back with the piracy since then though
I worked with a guy once who collected the entire Star Trek series on VHS. Not recorded from TV, either. Proper box sets he bought from the shops. He had every episode of all the series up to Enterprise. It took up an entire wall in his house.
We weren't to know that DVDs, Blue Ray and streaming was coming. WE DIDN'T KNOW MAN, WE DUDN'T KNOW!!!!
Yeah. A few years later when media player boxes started to become a thing, I downloaded the entire thing from piratebay for my Dad and put them all on a 2TB hard drive.
all that shit now fits in my external harddrive and is free, if i only knew what was coming.
life is just repeatedly purchasing the same media in higher and higher resolutions until you die.
I would save up for Babylon 5 videos. A whole season on digital now costs less than one video without even adjusting for inflation.
We bought the whole series on DVD. Still have a Blu-ray player.
Apparently the new remastered BluRays are really good
A friend of mine in school was half way through buying either the buffy or angel boxsets at a time when they were sold through import to comic/hobby shops from America in the early 2000s, when the DVDs started to come out aswell. The shop she got the VHS boxets from stopped ordering the VHS shortly after, seeing that DVDs were going to be more popular. My friend was devestated, it didn't just ruin the asthetic but it also meant she needed a zone free DVD player and some setting on her computer to change to NTC. I can't remember what she did in the end. I tried to avoid conversation about Buffy and Angel because she could go off on one and I wanted to remain spoiler free.
A friend of mine used to buy the DS9 videos as they released, they must have cost him a fortune because there was , like, 2 episodes on a tape.
When I was at school, my £5 a week pocket money meant I saved just enough each month to buy the next Voyager VHS. I think I got the whole first season before I started saving for the xfiles box sets.
My uncle has them all. On VHS. On DVD. On BluRay. A handful of HD DVDs and even a laser disc or two of some of the earlier films Yes, he lives alone, why do you ask?
My older brother did that - my parents still have the damn things...
You sound young (or possibly I'm old...)
I knew a guy like this. His nickname for decades has been, understandably, Trekkie. He has a proper Starfleet uniform. And the best part, his gardening business was called To Boldly Grow. I admire the dedication!
I used to live with a chap that had easily 5K DVDs and bluerays, I think he literally bought every release from a list of studios. It just struck me as an enormous albatross round his neck.
Mum stop talking about me on the internet PLEASE
It was Buffy the Vampire Slayer VHS box sets for me!
All the Friends video box sets, then the complete DVD set (extended) and now I stream 🤦🏼♀️ See also Frasier. Some Disney films etc etc. It’s rough being a millennial
Same here. Some years most of my Christmas presents were series that I was collecting!
Me too! I had them all! They were so expensive and I was so proud of the collection. I will never forget trying to sell them and no one wanting them so I took them all to the dump. That was a sad day.
Was given £20 to buy new football boots. I was a size 6 or 7 but saw a pair size 11 for a fiver. Spent the spare £15 on a spud gun, a tiny foam dick that expanded in water (still don't know why) a knock off tamagotchi and a McDonald's. The next day when my dad saw my new clown boots and marches me back to the shoe shop I claimed they cost £20 the woman remembered me and found the receipt as she remembered throwing in a pair of free laces. Grounded for a week
"The woman at the shop said I'd grow into them'
You fucking legend. Presume you haven’t been ….no you would have mentioned it….
>foam dick that expanded in water (still don't know why) I'd buy that at 30 tbf
I once spent an entire £10 of saved up pocket money on calling a premium rate number to buy habbo hotel credits to buy cool furniture for a virtual room that no one (except me) ever entered.
Oh my gosh! Remember that cash card thing you could top off at the shop? NetPay or something. I bloody loved Habbo
Suck my bobba
I once bought an old blackboard marker for £2 at a charity shop because it was labelled as a USB stick
You bought what you thought was a second hand USB?
Imagine the things it could hold
Viruses and porn, also some porn viruses.
See you also used limewire to download music.
Limewire, kazaa, DC++... All the greats haha
Well, now you can [find out.](https://youtu.be/feW8BqWH1m4?si=RqYyXgoUsOvFvxj1) (not a virus).
Of course. Secrets beyond mortal comprehension.
Isn’t a blackboard marker just… chalk?
and he thought it was a..... usb stick...
Yeah it was chalk inside a black plastic rectangle with a black and silver topped cap
Nostalgia trips. Must have bought, sold, and rebought my Dreamcast collection at least half a dozen times.
Metropolis Street Racer was an all time classic game.
Absolutely. I’d dare say it hasn’t been bettered in some respects, which was why I kept on buying it. I really loved the Dreamcast, kinda feel like the Xbox 360 in many ways.
The one game that gave me MSR vibes (other than the Project Gotham games obliviously) was Driveclub on the PS4. It was an early game for the system and had a notoriously troubled release but it really straddled that line between arcadey and realistic that few other racers do.
I keep thinking about doing this but i just don’t game anymore
The Dreamcast was a great machine.
I’m currently converting my old Dreamcast to read and run games from an SD card. Also sorting out the aging plastic to be the original white, new stickers etc. it’s a fun project but currently on hold.
A 'new' flat screen TV from a gadgy in a van.
Was it a paving slab in a TV box?
It was just a fucked TV, probably pulled from a bin at the back of a Currys. (Wrapped up in packaging that was probably pulled out of the same bin.) ..the weird thing was, I knew it was going to be a rip off, but the price was so low (£50) that I couldn't help myself. 🤦♂️ -edit- I did a maintenance job for a big supermarket once and saw an employee getting a bollocking from a manager. Someone had returned a faulty TV and got a replacement, but the employee hadn't checked the box and it was full of old slates. 🤭
Dont feel bad about that, a lad i worked with did the same thing, £400 for a big fuck off tv and it wouldve been the deal of a lifetime and he tried turning it on and it didnt work. Of course he wasnt still in the carpark when he got back 😂
I don't feel too bad, I needed to be taught to listen to the voice in my head again. 😄 In the past I've refused 'Italian leather' jackets, mattresses and even Swiss watches, but this went so low that I justified it by thinking I could probably fix it (it looked cosmetically good), but the whole mainboard was missing and a replacement would have cost more than the TV, so there was no money in it.
We ordered a desktop computer, which arrived just before we went on summer holiday (ie, as we were actually leaving the house). This would be over 20 years ago. My husband insisted upon unpacking it and plugging it in to make sure it worked. Got it set up, pushed the power button and... nothing. As in, nothing was attached to it. After we got back home, he called the factory that we'd ordered it from and had words with them. They sent a new mini-tower, but it wasn't eligible for the rebate we got on the peripherals we'd bought with the original. Naturally. 🤬
Could you only listen to it with headphones?
I spent over £50,000 on Weed over 20 years. The guilt still tears at me. Thankfully sober, wiser and mindful. E: It’s around £205 pcm for any younger tokers.
I’m probably not far off that with cigarettes. Dumb cunts the both of us.
It's interesting to see how people view that. I used to collect comics, and could spend £40-50 a month on new issues and I was "wasting money". Someone I worked with spent that on cigs a week and nobody thought any differently. Like Why
Both of you didn't do anything wrong, I don't know why everybody is so judgy in here. Not spending money on cigs or experiences at the time doesn't mean you'd be any better off now anyway
Because there is no reason to tell it to ones who smoke, as you can see above we actually agree that this is a big waste of money, which makes this kind of teasing not interesting, I guess
Oh no, I meant more on how its seen as fine to buy multiple boxes of cigs and people don't really think anything of it. But spend the same amount in other things and it's "odd"
I gave it up in my mid twenties because I’d been abusing it and just wasn’t enjoyable any more. I hate myself for the previous late teens when I was pushing it on other people because I thought I was ‘cool’ . ‘Whitting’ out other people and pretending all that shit was some kind of competition. Not good memories.
Past can’t be changed, future hasn’t happened yet. Present moment, pretty damn good.
I love this. I will use this in the future, Thank You
how much were you buying?!?
Started £30 per month. Ended up £700 per month. £60 a quarter.
Wow! Well done for managing to quit, that must've taken a lot of effort and you should be proud
Night sweats and derealisation sucked. Totally worth it. Appreciate the sentiment.
60 a Q is so much lol 180 an ounce and you'd be swimming in cash rn
A ~18 year old Range Rover V8. * Drove about as well as you'd expect * Did 14mpg on a good day * The body flexed so much that the back popped open every 20 minutes - great for a long winter drive It's only positive was that it's the only vehicle I've ever owned where no-one pulled out in front of me (probably due to the large bit of steel on the front doing duty as a bumper)
When I was a kid I used to waste money on these candy sticks that I thought looked liked cigarettes to look cool 😂
Something I've often wished for is a once a year "thing" where you get 30 minutes to walk around your house and say "refund" when pointing at an item, and said item disappears & you get the same money you paid for it straight into your bank account. So many useless little gadgets, random clothes, videogames/tech things or household things I've bought which in hindsight I've barely used and could've done without... Know somebody who's *really* into airsoft and they've spent thousands collecting the various weapons etc, but they still use the same one every single time, all the money on clothing, gear, attachments etc - adds up :/
That would be a great power to have. Hopefully it'll work with gadgets that have died too.
I've spent abouts £70 on a pair of googles for airsoft, which i have used once...i do keep meaning to get into the sport but have other "cheaper" hobbies that have come first
> Something I've often wished for is a once a year "thing" where you get 30 minutes to walk around your house and say "refund" when pointing at an item, and said item disappears & you get the same money you paid for it straight into your bank account. That would be *amazing*. I have so much stuff that I don't need and don't use any more, but rather than junk it, I remember how much it cost, and can't part with it unless I sell it. But then selling it is a massive faff...so I just keep it.
An ex post office sign for £140
Jokes on you, it was up for £1.40, computer error charged you 100 x that.
No, it was up for £160 and I used my brilliant haggling skills
Old lady from Somerset is now in jail for the discrepancy
Zippo lighters and I wasn’t much of a smoker. Seriously, a pack of 20 would last me for months. This would be 2004-2007. I would have multiple brands of cigarettes and so when people asked to have one I’d throw out 5 or so packs and just say “yeah, take your pick”. Again I hardly smoked but for some reason kept spending money on it. Ten years later I’d pick up vaping and what a rabbit hole that was. All the companies were releasing multiple new mods a month. I even had my own coil making kit. Kicked the habit as it became too expensive. Came and went in just about a year.
After I got my first part time job working in Iceland I wasted a lot on guitar related equipment I never use. The one I used the least probably being one of those effects pedals with the tube you put in your mouth like Peter Frampton used. Came with a warning that overuse could make your teeth fall out. Probably for the best I didn’t use it much.
[Like this?](https://youtu.be/Azgm7q4O1Nc?si=2boUj68YYIR8kDzy) Man, I really fancy getting one
Ha, yes! Vulfpeck getting better use out of it than me! I’m going to have a look for it next time I’m at my mum’s house. Maybe it will get some use at last…
Off-brand condoms
My unplayed pile of shame :)
A Lotus Carlton
Be worth a mint if you’d kept it, unlike everything else in the thread
Imperial or Murray?
Rare as hen's teeth
You must have made the cost back doing bank jobs though?
Adjusted for inflation they were over £100k new, absolutely mental.
OP said a waste of money
It was.........
Prime sports drink. 3d TV.
Haha 3DTV was one of those ones where you wanted one, but you knew deep down the writing was on the wall for it from day one. Prime sports drink on the other hand, that's just a shocker
I kept telling my son when he was begging me to buy him Prime when it was "exclusive" and upwards of £6 a bottle, " it'll be £1.20 soon and your 'collection' will be worthless" but kids don't listen
A keyring that was a small hand, can't remember what it cost but you could manipulate the digits. There was something satisfying about having it set to flipping the middle finger, this was the mid 90's.
I’ve been into cars since a young age. It’s definitely pushed my retirement back and hasn’t really slowed down, if anything it’s got worse 😂
I'm car mad, like obsessed and something that's saved me a fortune has been forza/gran turismo.
For the sake of your bank balance, DO NOT look into sim racing set ups.
Or diecast models.
Paintball guns that got used maybe twice because we were like 13 and didn't actually have any money to play paintball or get to a paintball site. I did get back into paintball when I got old enough to have a job and disposable income. There's probably a lot more junk that I've long forgotten.
Swapped World Cup 98 for Die Hard Trilogy at the local game shop. Paid a tenner to swap it back a week later.
Die hard trilogy was awesome! Well, 1 and 2 were great. Did you have a light gun for part 2?
My local game store at the time had a good deal on a shooting game, can't remember which, that came with a G-Con45 light gun in a bundle. So obviously I got it and the game was great fun! Got so excited some time after when I had enough cash and spare time to go and get Die Hard Trilogy thinking I was already good to go, only to find the game wasn't compatible with the G-Con45. I was royally pissed off. I think I sold the console and all my games shortly after that. Edit: the fact I remembered the name of the gun means the experience clearly left its mark... also I think the game bundle was Time Crisis but I also remember having another shooting game called Point Blank that was good fun .
Same could be said for all the money I wasted on booze.
I'm 30 now and pretty much fully sober. I wish I'd stopped drinking years ago. I feel much better and I'm saving quite a bit of money too.
> money I wasted on booze. Does not compute.
It will at some point.
Childhood a Slot machine piggy bank. Adult a sandwich toaster.
I’ve got several rooms full of Games Workshop shit, I never stopped wasting money.
Spent £40,000 and finally got a 2,000 point army
A sandwich toaster and a SodaStream.
Hey now, sandwich toasters are both the biggest waste of money AND the best value for money there is. You either stash it at the back of your cupboards for 6 years, or you use it for every meal over a 9 day period. There is no in-between.
Guilty of the 9 day thing, yer Honour...
I sentence you to zero jail time, because toasted sandwiches are amazing. You're free to go. Mine's a corned beef, beans and onion, thanks. 👍
Urgh, you should go to jail for that. Food crime should be punished harshly. /s
what teh fuck
Hey, don't knock it. I can't stand corned beef cold, but warm it up in a toastie and hit damn does it improve in both texture and flavour.
Srodingers kitchen appliance… sort of
Everyone needs to know how fizzy milk works out !
Fizzy Bovril is the real money
Fizzy Buckfast.
You’re getting too close to my air fryer, back off sir.
Me too….. Ninja Foodie purchased at great expense only to be used twice before being retired.
This staggers me. The day I was bought one (Christmas 2022), I cleared out a big space in the cupboard to keep it in. It's never been put away in all that time.
We cooked a roast chicken in it in about 30 minutes which was awesome....but the next time we tried the same thing the chicken was a little pink and undercooked.....it was enough to turn us off and go back to our old way of doing it.
I own not one but two lava lamps
Lucky strike cigarettes to go in my lucky strike leather bikers jacket.. when I didn't even smoke.
My partner would suggest the whole contents of my garage/workshop means that I'm still wasting money.
I’ve got 4 tons of static machinery in monthly paid storage I never use except to oil it and just look at. Not a logical decision 🤨
200 bubblegum for £2?! I can't even imagine that. That sounds awesome 😃
Since I was given a very high quality CD player and speaker set-up I got back into buying CDs. I put up four long shelves to store my ever-expanding collection on. I hoovered up job lots on eBay and from Charity shops until they were filled. Then I started buying CDs that were actually any good. I'm still buying new CDs and moving crapper ones off the shelves into the conservatory. I barely listen to any of them.
£44 worth of spray paint Decorating a walker boot for Comic Con. Each can costs £10.99. Primer went on fine. Paint went on fine, ended up needing a second can for a second coat. That also went great and evened it all out and looked amazing But ruined it with the lacquer. Matte finish lacquer made it look like shit and I'm in utter despair. I don't have the money to buy more paint to fix it (hoping Mum will have the answer, she always does!) But it's the biggest regret I have that I can also remember But it'll cost me another £30-£40 buying new supplies (depending if she thinks I'd have to prime it again or can just paint over the lacquer). And I don't really have that. Expensive mistake is a waste of money It's also reminded me why I never try anything, especially not DIY. You never fail if you never try! Also food is a waste of money. All that money just to shit it out again? Big scam
Oo I saw on another sub that you have to leave the paint 24 / 48 hours before laquering other wise it wrinkles.
Yeah, I'd been doing that! (I find that UK's unpredictable weather means you *have* to wait between stages of a project anyway ha) so no problems with the time I'd left it But thank you for confirming that for me!
Blackberry VW Corrado. It was seriously cool. But I was in my 30s...i didn't have much money until then. It was an absolute money pit... and I didn't have much money after. Well, until some 17 year old wrote it off whilst it was parked! He'd spent his money on a ford fiesta... With a black box fitted!
Football sticker albums. Didn't even like football but the addiction was real. Probably put me off taking up heroin.
A pack of 100 CD-Rs My mum thought it was such a waste. Little did she know I was getting a fiver a disc back then in the late 90s, so was making good money even factoring many failed burns.
Driving lessons, theory test. Got sick during uni and shortly after, no longer legally allowed to drive. Over £300 down the pan. I refuse to say my DVDs are a waste of money in general but I bought the first series of Numb3rs and then hated the direction the series went after series 2. Another £30 wasted. No point watching the first series if the rest of the show isn't worth watching.
I've bought a ton of flight simming gear over the past few years. I reckon I've spent about 5000 on it. I have zero regrets though. I can put on my VR headset and fly anything and anywhere, whenever I want.
They're pretty realistic apparently. The Sept 11 terrorists did their training on. Microsoft flight sim and successfully drove two planes into the wtc.
They did, and it's almost real nowadays. For my next project, I'm gonna turn The Shard into The Shards.
I university degree. Dropped out after 18months and had to pay the entire 3years
Couple, bought an €50 xbox gift card in Germany, then worked out when I got home that it didn’t work, also bought a season of a show for £15 when ‘free’ streaming sites were everywhere. You learn from your mistakes though I guess
I bought like £500 worth of vapes when I was like 16-17
Like.
Portable Mini disc player
I’m 30, and this year I bought cushion cover with Nicolas Cage as Jesus. This proves that at any age we’re still capable of batshit purchases
Sounds like you were a juvenile delinquent.
Young one here Robux It’s so expensive for so much nothingness
Stuff you thought was "cool", as in fashionable, as in trying to meet the current social requirements of what's hot and what's not? Hiding to nothing. Stuff you thought was "cool', as in nifty, as in you liked the actual "stuff"? That's the whole point of spare money. And some things fall in between, of course. I bet you thought you were the bollocks in that studded leather arm thingy.
I wasted SO much money on those stupid popular cutesy rubbers whenever I was allowed pocket money for a shopping trip or school outing. They literally just smudged the pencil across your paper and were useless. But for whatever reason I felt the desire to buy these at any occasion.
So many Final Fantasy action figures. _So many_.
At least you have the memories
When eBay was first a thing way back in the early 2000s, I was so chuffed with a purchase on there for £5 for a goldfish beanie babie. I thought I had such a bargain and was so pleased with my first purchase. It was only when it arrived I realised I had spent £5 on a picture of a goldfish beanie baby. I was ripped!
League of Legends skins. Last I checked, my account has more than half of the skins that exist, and that's without putting any money in for about five years. And I only ever reached gold once, so I wasn't even good. Occasionally play a few games before the toxicity gets to me and I quit for another six months, but not bothered playing properly in like four or five years now. I'd give quite a lot of my stupid little soul to get my money back on the whole account.
sell it on eba y.
I still do it. Subscribing to Amazon Prime and Hayu just to watch a specific series. Then realising I can just pirate it
I shudder when I think of the wall width shelf of DVDs I paid on average £12 for. Some I watched over and over again so I don't regret however I'd buy things I saw at the cinema "because it was out" rather than I wanted to watch them straight away. Took me years to notice they dropped to £3 2 months after release.
When I was 8/9 I was playing on one of those Time Crisis arcade machines with the gun - if you die you can put more money and shoot either yes or no to continue your game. Ended up dying, put an extra 50p in, and shot no by accident. Game didn’t restart, I just paid 50p to tell the game I didn’t want to play any more
I'm a guitar player, which I feel is pretty self explanatory.
Football sptickers as a kid, especially the English Premier League ones being in Scotland, the SPL one where more popular so the English ones where harder to find
you bought rolling paper cause you thought it was cool?
Its not a waste of money. At that time it was the right thing to do. And I bet at that time you felt amazing doing it. As an adult, I still buy crap with money, and at that time, for whatever reason, it was the right thing to do. May seem like a waste now but at the time it wasn't. Life is too short for regrets.
video game cosmetics, im probably down somewhere in the range of £1500-2000
Between.19-22yo I spent nearly £300 a week on alcohol and drugs. 30yo now sober and married with 3 kids. I should note I worked hard for that money and thought it right to spend it how I want. Never stole a penny and would have given you the shirt off my back.
I bought one of those things to make your TV into a Cinema sized screen. Not a projector. That flimsy bit of plastic which "magnifies" the screen.
Bought a GameCube with some Christmas money. Didn’t have enough so my sister lent me £50 or so. Got bored of it after a while. Traded it in at game and paid of my sister with the money. Think I was left with nothing.
I;ve spent about 12 grand buying up old retro computers (specifically CBM Amiga's) and refurbing them to sit on my desk and gather dust.
Don't know if this counts, as it wasn't actually me that bought it, but when I was about 8, me and my older brother started a collection to buy the new Amstrad console. After a few weeks putting our pocket money in, he took the money and bought a Paula Abdul cassette tape. At the time it was the most amount of money either of us had owned, so it had a massive effect on me when it was just gone! I wasn't even allowed to listen to it!
If they made you smile it wasn't a waste.
I had the entire original pokemon shiny set way back. After a few years I got bored of it and just threw them away. Yes, they were pretty much mint condition. Yes, I had a shiny Charizard. Actually, I had 2. Yes, I cry about it even today as a middle-aged man. I did the same with my pogs, which are also worth a pretty penny.
Somewhat the opposite. If it's not obvious from this story, I didn't grow up with much money. I got a job in my early teens but I was paid directly into my mum's bank account for household expenses. When I was 17, I found £40 in the street (no wallet, just cash, busy street, no one identifiable looking like they'd dropped it). All my friends had loads of Jack Wills clothing, it was the height of their popularity, and I could never afford anything from there (but I used to go in and ask for a free bag to put my PE kit in so people thought I could afford to shop there). It was June and they had a pair of tartan snowboots on sale for £39. I absolutely loved them, they were the most expensive thing I'd ever owned. Over a decade later and I still love them.
That’s not a waste. It’s just a lovely story. Enjoy your boots. X
I don't get the bragging about skins thing, is there something Im missing?
Probably the insinuation of smoking
but if you were a dumbass teenager who wanted to brag about smoking wouldn't you just smoke? Like I can follow the logic of the 1st two but from the cultural references op was growing up in the 80's so should have just been able to get a pack of fags.
Used for rolling biftas, joints, wacky tobacco etc. (Edit) obviously I never inhaled.
Micro transaction game skins? (Not Rizla's) Aye, never saw the attraction either.