Five Ways to Waste $276 Because Money Grows on Tree
Posted by Cap in Woops, Bought Crap |Yeah grows on tree my ass.
If you like to waste money by being stupid, forgetful, and lazy, here’s five ways to do it.
DMV Registration Late Fee – $39
Why pay your car registration on-time? Live life “dangerously” by delaying your smog check and car registration. If you hold out long enough, the penalty fee along with your chance of getting car impounded increases exponentially!
Fix-It Ticket from Expired Registration – $10
If registering your car late isn’t cool enough, try driving around a busy city with expired registration tags, you’re bound to get noticed by a police officer or two — especially once they run your plate and realize your car is registered from a county 400 miles away!
Street Cleaning Parking Ticket – $50
Pulled over by popo too exciting for you? Just ignore NO PARKING signs or assume that the street you parked on is a-okay. For extra cool points, get yourself pull over along with a parking ticket within the span of 3 hours — Lord knows someone was able to pull that off.
Balance Transfer Snafu Finance Charges – $161
If you think using 0% APR offers and credit card arbitrate is cool, try taking advantage of 18 months offers when credit was abundant (circa 2007) and ignore/forget when your balance transfer promotion ends. From 0% to 14.95% on a $13,000 balance? Super cool.
Overdue Fees for Library Books – $16
For the less adventurous types, overdue fees from returning library books late is the perfect way to rack up dollars in stupid tax. Score bonus points by bringing books with you while on vacation abroad and neglecting to renew the books ONLINE — because we all know that extra convenience factor the library added for you is just for show.
Got other ways to waste money that wasn’t listed here? Maybe something your brother’s friend’s cousin did? Sharing (anonymously) is caring.
24 Comments to “Five Ways to Waste $276 Because Money Grows on Tree”
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June 8th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Neglecting routine maintainence on your auto which results in a broken timing belt (while in motion). My car has an interference motor and, well, it interfered *slightly* damaging a valve (I was going slow). ~$1100 (repair + other minor ‘routine’ crap I neglected) on a ~$3000 car. Fun times. Especially when you have your toddler in the car when it happens. Even more fun when you are starting to save for a car for your wife and this wipes out what little savings you have started.
June 8th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
alright you’re winning so far Chris. thats pretty rough. sister did a similar thing.. neglecting oil change and engine literally ran out of lube so it damaged valve. $2,000 engine swap (since its cheaper vs fixing cam/valves) for a $4,500 car. nice.
June 8th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Write a check from the wrong bank account. NSF charges = $40.
Chris is still winning. Ouch. Reminds me to make an appointment for my car…
June 8th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Relative wins brand new car and $7,000 towards taxes on said vehicle in contest.
Drives new car for a few months.
Gets tired of it.
Meets slick car dealer.
Trdes new, PAID FOR car in
June 9th, 2009 at 9:41 am
haha, oh man some of these are awesomely crazy. don’t have one to offer myself, just waiting to see some more ;) always a learning experience!
June 9th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Oooh… you got me on the overdue fees at the library! But, I am trying to get better about that one! But this post is more proof that little things make all the difference. If you’ve read The Power of Small by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval then you know what I mean!
June 9th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
I feel everyone’s pain. I think I’ve made almost all of those financial blunders.
How about this.
Fail to make a COMPLETE stop before making a right turn or fail to completely stop behind the intersection line before making a right turn and get a red light ticket in the mail. OUCH
$100 that I had to pay for not coming to a complete stop before turning on red.
But I guess I’m not alone on that one. These red light cameras have become revenue streams for cities.
Near my home in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, one red light camera outside a popular shopping mall raked in $1 million in fines between November 2008 and January 2009 – 10,000 tickets, almost all for people who did not stop completely before making a right turn at the light.
June 9th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
i hate finding those tickets on my windshield.
June 10th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Hey, don’t feel bad about the Library fines. Libraries are notoriously underfunded and depend on the help of their patrons. I sometimes purposely forget to renew my books so I can pay the fine. I feel like hey, every little bit helps me be able to borrow another new book from the library. =)
June 10th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Over-estimate your childcare expenses for your flexible spending accounts. At least with the medical accounts, you can buy a bushel of Excedrin at the end of the year.
June 13th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Oh wow. You’ve got some good ones! One night I was going to cook a roast, but I couldn’t find it in the fridge. Know where it was? Still in the trunk of my car from when I went grocery shopping. I left two of my bags overnight in my car ruining about 30 bucks worth of meat and frozen foods. Nice!
June 13th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Y’all got nothing. Try re-roofing your house ($8,200 out of pocket) because the roof was too old, then having the same brand new roof destroyed by March 09 hailstorm ($1,700 in insurance deductible) … story courtesy of my neighbor.
June 15th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Max, the thing is that’s more of an act of God while others listed is act of man’s stupidity. Still pretty rough to get screwed over by the big man though.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Loved this post, even tweeted it!
Here’s a few of my own personal wasters:
1. failing (out of sheer laziness) to cancel a travel camera gear insurance policy in another country that charges me 10GBP/month, for the last 2 years. OOPS.
2. Failing to display my “N” symbol as a ‘new driver’ costing me a whopping $109 ticket.
3. Failing to wear my helmet while riding my scooter one block over to enjoy the breeze on a sunny day = $30 ticket.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:30 am
Only $5.00 but still bugs me a lot. Dealing with Dish over a problem they offered me FREE movie channels for three months. I had to terminate it after that or pay. They charged me $5.00 to quit my FREE offer. NEVER will I jump into anything FREE again!
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:57 am
Not so sure about the library books. My “personal” librarians tell me the money goes to the county coffers, not the library budget. Makes ‘em not so aggressive about collecting.
I’ve racked up about $14 of fines over the last four years according to my online record…best interest free loan of my life! And at 50 books a year not bought, a great deal.
June 24th, 2009 at 2:14 am
In England if you miss any of the car related fines then you get caught it is a £1000.00 fine, and we have our system databased so that a police car can track from your number plate whether it is taxed, MOT’d and insured. You can in some cases have your car towed. I think sometimes it is just a way for them to make money for free
June 26th, 2009 at 5:54 am
Three years ago, right after I finished school, I had set up online repayment on my student loan. I tried to change the payment date online, but ended up submitting an extra payment instead. I didn’t have enough money in my checking account to cover the double pay and still have my rent check clear, so I “had” to take a cash advance against my credit card (no emergency fund). That $750 cash advance was at 21% interest…and I’m still trying to pay off the balance on the card due to many foolish money decisions made during and just after grad school. I have NO idea how much extra I have paid for that cash advance, but I’m sure the interest charges over the last 3 years, along with interest on the other part of the card balance, have been at least $1,000.
I stopped using credit completely in January and I’m aggressively paying down balances, but I still regret doing so much foolish stuff and living beyond my means (”I’ll pay it off when I get a job after school” was my excuse).
July 8th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Another car story – I didn’t realize that my registration was expired (live in Massachusetts). The cop had a tow truck operator tow it to my house (he said I couldn’t drive it until I got the registration renewed). Towing cost $75 (for 1 mile). I was shocked! So the cop took pity on me and only gave me a warning so I didn’t have to pay a ticket. I guess it was my lucky day LOL!
July 9th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Colleen: Rather surprised that the cop had the car towed, guess Mass. is not a state that plays around with expired tags… I think in CA you have to be operating a lengthy expired car to have any issues with being towed, generally it’s just a fix-it ticket and you’re on your way.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Yeah – this guy was tough. When I told him I’d take care of it the very next day (it was an honest mistake) he said “well, if you get into an accident then I could be held responsible for your expired registration ’cause it’s already called in and I could lose my house” … Don’t understand the logic there but at that point I stopped listening because I figured he was just adamant about towing my car and I better do it. :0( Later on I asked a friend who grew up in that town about the cop – he said this guy had been a bad-ass in high school, always getting into trouble. Didn’t mean for this to be a cop rant story, though. I have plenty of stories of nice cops too!
December 13th, 2009 at 6:07 am
How ’bout how to waste $650 on a rental car, $1200 on parts and labor for new computer chip in 2001 neon and then end up buying a new(used) car for $18000 8 months later – instead of dropping another $1500 – 2000 on said neon. It had to be done because we have two small children and needed a larger vehicle that would fit us without our chins in our ears but still. Wish it didn’t cost so much for cars!
December 13th, 2009 at 6:08 am
Oh yeah also just got the tags and registration on neon transferred to our new home state a month before new car purchase so that was another $101 wasted because here the tag stays with the car.
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:37 pm
Buying bottled water after the gov’t spends millions of dollars to purify our tap water is a waste of money. Who taught our kids that they can’t drink water unless it comes from a bottle? We use to drink from the garden hose when we were kids.