Money Mishaps and Misfortunes

I'm fessing up. I’m not perfect with money. I've made mistakes I want to help you avoid now, with coaching I'd tell myself if I could go back and intervene just in time.

Here we go...

But first, why is talking about our health and weight and exercise habits so common but talking about money with each other remains still taboo?

None of us are wearing cool wearable tech yet on our bodies that tracks, uploads, and shares our miles, points, bank balances, smart purchases, investment choices, and return rates with each other the way many upload their steps, routes, rides, swim strokes, and heart rate data socially. If how well we're doing with our money were as shared and discussed I think everyone would be more supported and inspired on their path to getting financially fit.

You may not learn one new thing by reading this blog where I will do just that with you. But my hope is it helps at least one person learn one new thing. I contend it’s more fun to learn together as a Club than alone. And as your Club leader, I am happy to nurture your learning in one little place where everyone who joins this Club is here as a helper not a hater.

Your thoughts are welcome. And your input and feedback is always a gift. Please keep them coming.

Here are the 7 mistakes I regret making with my money. Don't make these too, please, and here's how to avoid them:

1. Spending $500 for a resume writer service once (back when LinkedIn was born) and never

utilizing it. What was I thinking!? This is especially silly since I can write my own resume! Sigh. Today, there's so much more tech, templates, examples, career sites, to help you do this on your own for free. Who's tried it on Chat GPT? You know yourself, talents, and skills the best. Do it your way, in your words, and if you need a second set of eyes have a friend look it over for you. I love looking over friends' resumes for them, even more than my own. As a friend. I'm sure they'll do it. Take their advice in and maybe bolster your resume with it for free!

2. Overfunding my Limited Use Flexible Spending Account (LUFSA) by about $1,600 in 2022. I thought my two sons’ 8 wisdom teeth extractions and dental work would hurt me more than it'd hurt them. Wink! But, the upfront cost estimate was a way bigger gut punch than it turned out to be after all settled, and then I had about $1600 too much in my use it-or-lose-it [not-so] flexible spending account that I couldn't claim and later forfeited. This already included a carry over. Some companies will let you not lose up to $X that you can carry over, but the rest you lose. These LUFSAs are a great way to preserve your Health Savings Account dollars for growth because you never lose those. But, while you want to max your HSA, you must only fund FSAs to the amount you are quite certain can be spent in the year you are funding them. Otherwise you mourn more money lost. So the best tips if you have one of these LUFSAs or FSAs (not HSAs) are:

• Know what the limited uses are to target (like dental and vision). These aren't regular FSAs, they're used in tandem with HSAs for very limited uses. a Health FSA is use it or lose it. A LUFSA is that way too. A Health Savings Account (HSA) is not that way, these savings are yours for life. Keeping these straight is key to your financial savvy super powers. The trick in differentiating them is knowing what the 'S' stands for in each. Is it for 'spending' or is it for 'savings?'

• Get accurate quotes for those limited services like dental and vision prior to choosing the amount of annual funding you want in your LUFSA. True for any Flexible Spending Account (FSA)--only set aside/fund what you know you'll spend. Including Dependent Care Assistance Plans (DCAPs), which help you set aside dollars you're going to spend on child care anyway but simultaneously designate the dollars tax-free/not subject to income taxation.

• Understand by when you have to get your receipts into the claims processing system. At my company we have until Dec. 8, 2023 to file FSA claims for 2022. What's your deadline? Maybe it's the same? Don’t forgo your claims - do the work to get that money back in your pocket. Create a 'Receipts Go Here' folder at home. Scan receipts too so they're always findable on your PC.

• Learn what counts as eligible spending and use up any remaining unspent dollars before the year ends. Even if they give you up to another year to file the claim (in the pre-pandemic years at my company we only had until end of March of the following funded year, so pay attention to that deadline each funded year you contribute), you can only file claims for reimbursements on expenses incurred in the year you funded the account. Know about how you can spend these dollars even on over the counter (OTC) eye drops, eyeglass, readers, repair and cleaning kits, and even denture/retainer cleaner products. Don't leave this money on the table like I did. I got busy and I just let it go. So even though I still have time to file 2022 claims at work, I can't because I didn't buy $1600 worth of OTC eye drops before December 31, 2022. Sigh.

3. Going out of network on my High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) for every kind of rotator cuff relief offered to me between 2021 and end of 2022 and then not filing all the claims that I could have (I still may have time for some of them) against my out-of-pocket max. If you have ever had a shoulder injury, my condolences. I think labor pain was easier. When you're living in chronic pain, it is certainly harder to stay focused on finances and fitness of any kind. I know. Hang in there! It got better for me and hope so for you. In my plan, we have one year from the date of service to file out of network reimbursement claims against the plan’s out of pocket max. After that out of pocket max amount is reached, if we have more claims, we get all the excess money we spent back in our pockets. Your physical health impacts your financial health (and vice versa).

4. Not updating my Trust sooner even though I needed to make a couple edits especially the last few years. They’re underway now! But what if I had been too late!? Please always make sure you know exactly what would legally happen to your money if you were to pass away and make edits without delay to ensure it's all stated as you wish. Your family and heirs will thank you for leaving them a financial legacy and not a financial fallacy. And this too: I sat my sons down and showed them what the trust actually said, I involved them in some of the decision making too as appropriate. They chose the age they wanted to be when they would close the trust and inherit the remaining value one day. They now know what a good plan looks like and will know what to expect and what their rights are up front. This was such a good set of conversations. Bonding. And peace of mind building. Following this, I wondered if everyone does that now? My parents never have. Some cultures and families are just not in the practice of it. Since I did so, I happened to later hear Warren Buffett on TV at his live shareholder meeting ponder his own mortality and how he ensures all his heirs know exactly what his plans and directives say. Plus one, Mr. Buffett.

5. Focusing on paying off my mortgage faster for the ‘peace of mind’ in owning my home outright when I more enjoy the peace of mind of good debt to leverage at impossibly low rates perhaps even more! Ah well, it’s nearly paid off now and I’m not looking back. I am sad that a young person today like I once was likely can't as do-ably buy and pay off a home in under two decades like I was able to. The peace of mind I created is fabulous. However, it feels tough to not be able to find < 3% rates anymore to enjoy leveraging like I once did. [Her thoughts drift to another blog she'll write one day for anyone not yet a home owner to read up about all the pros and cons of home ownership within the scope of an overall financial plan in the economic world we're operate in today. Don't wait on me! Search for that string of text I just wrote by pasting it in your web browser if you're eager to learn about all these considerations right now... go! Learn! Grow.]

Aw, still here? Ok... here's another couple of my regrets to learn from...

6. Getting way into debt in my 20s and not focusing on digging out of it seriously enough until my 30s. Credit cards were a mystery to me when I was 17 and 18 and on my own for the first time and they handed them out like candy on my college campus. Do they still do that today? Free frisbees, tee shirts, and credit cards on the spot? I was a sucker. And those little plastic cards worked like magic to keep up with the rich kids. But they only made me poorer. I carry no credit card debt today - of course not after each month of racking up mileage and points. Hindsight. If I could talk to my 18-year-old self now about how the power of compounding working in both directions, just think how much better off I'd be had I dug out of debt sooner or not got myself buried in it in the first place. The power of compounding: those who understand it, earn it, those who don't pay it! Tell the others!

7. Not suing a previous employer in my 20s for bounced paychecks/back pay/overdraft fees they owed me after they went bankrupt unexpectedly and were no where to be found to hold accountable. Always stand up for yourself, my Club Friends. Your hard earned money matters at every age. I'm still dumbfounded they did me like that and it was three employers ago and nearing thirty years now. Ever had a paycheck bounce? Ever show up to work and find the place boarded up unexpectedly? What did you do about it?

Ok – that was all good to get off my chest. And I hope I’ve made it easier for you all not to make these same mistakes.

I've heard a lot of other money oopsie daisies over the years of running The Money Matters Club. Including some pretty heartbreaking misfortunes I couldn't have imagined on my own. Your fellow Club friends would join me in having you learn to avoid these other unfortunate money mishaps we've collected recently and from over the years from other storytellers, friends, and Club members too!

Ready for more?

• Not negotiating your pay, pricing, terms, quotes, bids, etc. Do you accept the first offer? You'll pay more unnecessarily. Doesn't hurt to try to get a better price. If you get a better deal, tell the others about how you did! Always tell the others!

• Insuring a new car that’s now much older. Call up your insurance company and be sure you're not overpaying. The rate for insuring a 5-year old car is certainly less now than when it was to insure the car when it was shiny and new to you. Did they tell you this proactively or let you keep paying the new car rate hoping you won't notice?

• Missing out on getting a discount on your cellular plan. Cable? Insurance bundle? Cannot hurt to ask. Also check at the office. Does your company already negotiate better prices on these products and services on your behalf and all you have to do is sleuth the company coupon code or dedicated link to the discount? Boost your purchasing power by leveraging the perks and employee discounts you might be leaving on the table back at work if you're unaware of them.

• Trusting a malicious “money manager” to manage your money. People near and dear to me or even perfect strangers (wow, have you seen the Bernie Madoff documentary on Netflix called The Monster of Wall Street yet? Go. That's a shockingly better education and cautionary tale you won't soon forget...) have been burned by these bad actors. Do not let it happen to you. Oh, good, you stayed here? Then here is another relevant tip: No one is ever going to care about your money more than you will. Manage the manager if you do have one. Don't hand over all your keys and cards no matter how kind or 'fiduciary' they seem up front. Set up some controls you and only you can decide on. Vet them. Vet them continually.

• Trusting that your partner / spouse “has it under control.” Please know where the money is and how it’s managed too, directed, invested, the fees, the fine print, the account numbers, and passwords, etc. Don’t just trust your partner has it under control. Manage the money as a 50/50 partnership.

• Divorce without prenups that can financially devastate you and set you back years. Depending on your age you may never bounce back. I see too much of this. Well isn't the divorce rate in the U.S. known to be about 50%?

• Spouse/Ex takes or steals or ruins their partner’s credit without the person knowing. Spouses can turn out to be the bad actors you only read about or watch on Jerry Springer re-runs. May he rest in peace after all the chaos he stirred up on earth. Too soon? Well he showed us a lot of bad spouses gone wild. Bad spouses can happen. Sad. Rare perhaps. But it occurs. Always be looking at your free credit reports for signs of anything being misused tied to your identity and credit. Be the one who opens the mail. Watch carefully where the money goes. A well structured prenup can help too to keep your debt accumulation legally and defensibly separated as well.

• Spouse misinforms their partner that they cannot inherit their parents' estate, citing authoritatively that only a husband can inherit assets (this is not only untrue in the U.S., it's financial abuse). I've known it happens that sometimes a spouse is brand new to the U.S. legal and financial law systems and they just believe their spouse is telling them the truth. Know your rights. Stand up for your rights. Not only can a woman inherit her parents' wealth in the U.S., but she can choose to never co-mingle those funds and assets with her spouse and preserve it for herself and in a divorce it would not be split with the other spouse so long as it was never co-mingled.

• Procrastination. It really kills your upside wealth potential to put off a concerted focus on money, budgeting, saving, and investing. Even if you're debt free. If you are putting off really investing for the long term, you'll stay right where you are or worsen by not beating the cost of inflation. Inertia hurts. I always tucker a bit at news of my friends saying 'I got out of the market and moved to cash.' They got spooked and couldn't stand the risk of 'losing' their savings in one fail swoop of a downturn, so they moved it all to cash to preserve and defend against more losses. Now they're hurting their chances of compounding and big returns when the market rebounds. To be sitting on all cash is just as scary to me. No one can know when to get back in the market either. Keeping a long term perspective once you're in it is a super power. [She thinks about composing a reverse dollar cost average out strategy to describe a less knee jerk money move to help those close to retirement move some of their wealth to more stable value parking spots, without exiting the market in a fail swoop, ...but she saves the thoughts for a future blog another day.]

• Person doesn’t keep track of old retirement, stock, profit sharing accounts after jumping from employer to employer and their assets get “escheated.” Escheatment is a process where if the payer cannot find you anymore at the last known address after weakly attempting to for a few years, they turn your money over to your last known state's State Controller to keep tabs on it if you do ever come for it. It can occur on any type of account. Banking, escrow, even an old credit card you closed after paying the final payment but somehow unknowingly or inadvertently paying $X too much, or say even your old insurance company trying to refund you an over payment after an adjustment or audit but you're long since gone from that apartment and changed insurance companies already and your old one gives up trying to give you back the refund you're owed. You name it. Oh! And here’s a fun tip: as you click around to find your lost dollars, it’s way more fun to whisper ‘Show me the money!’ as you wait for the page to load… Go! Here's just a few quick links where lots of my Club Friends are from already, (or just search the web for your own state directly):

  • Arizona unclaimed property: https://azdor.gov/unclaimed-property

  • California Unclaimed Property:  https://www.treasurer.ca.gov/unclaimed.asp

  • Illinois: https://icash.illinoistreasurer.gov/

  • Oregon unclaimed property: https://unclaimed.oregon.gov/#!

  • Texas Unclaimed Property: https://www.claimittexas.gov/#!

  • Washington State Unclaimed: https://ucp.dor.wa.gov/

We spent 5 minutes on this clicky money hunt exercise at a recent Money Matters Club session at the office, over where the Club's first home is still located. It was fun to watch the live chat feed for posts from the couple hundred attendees flying by like, “I found $100 just now in OR!” “I found $72 and donated it in Texas already!” “I found $846 …left in escrow!” After that spree, I wrote a new jingle for The Club, “It pays to play at The Money Matters Club, yay yay yay hip hip hurray!" OK, if you're still reading this, you just found the Easter Egg. Place our lil jingle in the comments and tell us all about the long lost old dollars you may have found too!

Would you like me to keep noting more misfortunes I've heard of from my fellow co-workers and Club Friends recently, as well as over the many years I've been doing this? If not too too TLDR, just keep on reading along as I list some more of them for you… (one's loss may be another's gain...):

• Previous employer hadn't actually funded a person’s retirement accounts for them (Social Security Administration, 401(k), etc.), even though the employee contributed and saw the deductions coming out of their paystubs. We learned it’s prudent to double check with the source / receiver that the dollars are actually getting funded, not just taken from you. Including the Social Security Administration, ask if they are seeing your contributions deposited. Do not delay in taking action if you find out they aren't.

• Employee forgot to update their beneficiary forms to new spouse, the ex collects all the life insurance and other benefits, account balances/savings/stock. Now I know some exes stay friendly, but this would be devastating for the new spouse and kiddos. Don’t you think?

• Employee forgets to add new dependents to health plan/benefits. Adding a newbie to your family is exciting. But you may only get a fast 30 days to do the paperwork and add your new humans to your benefits. In all the new excitement, don’t forget! Paying for well baby care without insurance that first year or until the new annual enrollment reset period comes around will be a regret!

• Employee forgot to exercise the employer awarded/granted stock options on time. Calendar your deadlines such as options expirations and give yourself runway to do the things! Always read the fine print. So important to learn to love reading the fine print; it’s there for you to leverage and it makes you smarter, often helps you reverse engineer or fast forward the payoffs or at least not miss them, when you know what the fine print says, including vesting schedules, tax treatments, and expiration dates.

• Employee never logged into their stock account, didn’t know they had dividends sitting in a cash account for years and years earning close to nothing. Always, always keep an eye on your stock account. If your employer set this up on your behalf, go look at it quarterly. Know what is vesting, when, and how. Understand what happens if you hold the shares. Are there dividends being paid to you regularly on those shares you didn't sell? Where are the dividends going? If not reinvested, they're paid out to you in cash and likely earning close to nothing for you just sitting in that cash area of your account waiting for you to put them to better use. Sweep that cash to something better. Once in an in-person workshop I asked the audience, 'Do you know where your dividends are?' Maybe a third raised their hands. Dozens of people didn't even know they were getting dividends let alone where they were to be found. You know, if you are brand new to the workforce and or the U.S. and have never been given stock before, you don't know what you don't know. Later on after I got off stage, a handful of my audience approached me after the session and told me of the thousands of dollars they just found and didn't know they even had. While that sounds fun to find a windfall of cash, the ouch factor that it could have been compounding into a much larger pile of cash over all those years of not knowing it was there, had it been invested, does kind of hurt to think about. Glad they came to the workshop, just think how many more years may have passed where that cash just sat idle and not working for them. If the bankers came barking at our doors as eagerly when we have money to be got and better leveraged as they would do when we have money to pay them back, we'd all be better off.

• Employee pays $2-4k for an estate plan and trust that could have cost under $300. At my company I got my entire estate plan instantiated for not much more than about $250, including a trust, will, advanced health care directive, power of attorney, and peace of mind. It amounted to about $10.50 per paycheck. Check and see if your company offers such a "Group Legal" plan (enroll typically during your annual enrollment period and it starts typically the next plan year on January 1). If already enrolled, no time like the present to call one of these attorneys on retainer at your disposal and get your estate planning steps started or revised. You can revise these documents as you like, as needed, but once established the Trust has a born on date and never changes. So if you revise the trust, the amendment supersedes the original paper (doesn’t rename the trust or re-date it) and this way you need never refund the trust with new directives, retitle the deed on your home to a revised trust name, etc. So it’s pretty easy to ask any attorney to amend an existing trust even if they didn't write it for you. To the extent they feel it’s a rework, they may rewrite it all but it will not be renamed or re-dated as a new entity from the one you established originally. This is the cheapest peace of mind to buy. Don’t delay if you have this available to you. Without a trust set up and specific instructions in your will, and so on, it gets costly, public, lengthy, burdensome, and argumentative for your financial legacy to transfer to your loved ones peacefully as you probably wanted.

If you are healing your broken heart over some big regrets that included major money misfortunes and you feel like you want to add more to our collective learning – you are welcome to opt into sharing from your heart below in the comments. By adding your regrets or tips in the chat to share and help other friends here at The Money Matters Club, you can not only let it go, free it from your heart, heal, but you can also teach others from how you learned the hard way. Paying something salvaged forward means it can't be a total loss.

I hope this helps you avoid any other future money missteps as you continue on your own journey toward financial fitness.

And remember, if you have a money mishap or misfortune you are still healing from, know this too shall pass. I humbly suggest maybe asking yourself what more you could have done to get a different result. If we’re not learning we’re not growing. Look onward and know it will be for not if we don’t move on, learn from it, and also tell the others.

Because money matters,

el*

*not an expert, just care...

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E.M.Powers ("el") is a regular person with no particular financial credentials or expertise who happens to be a money enthusiast and the founder of The Money Matters Club, a virtual watercooler for like minded individuals with a thirst for building their own financial health. Since 2006, she's helped thousands of co-workers build their financial literacy and wealth by participating in The Money Matters Club, a community she built on her employer's internal network. Since 2023, she's been attempting to scale The Club's reach through its second home on the World Wide Web. Her opinions--as well as the opinions of all participants--are just that: opinions, which are subject to flawed logic, math, typos and correction. She keeps a growth mindset and is also always learning something new or bolstering her own understanding after discussions at The Club. All information shared is done so with the best intent to inspire and empower others to learn more about money considerations toward building their own financial muscles. Nothing shared is meant as individualized advice that anyone should act on without doing their own curious research and personal decision making. There are no dumb questions at The Money Matters Club. Your financial health and literacy are what this Club cares about. All investing involves risk. All results can and will vary.