I bought some GameStop when it was $10 but chickened out and sold it a few days before it went to like $420 a share cuz I thought I was being baited by wallstreetbetters. I only later found out a close friend of mine who is a generally responsible investor was heavily in that and sold at like $200~ to pay off all his medical debt. He’s not rich either, but financially better off than before that happened.
I don’t mess with stocks now.
Idk how well this would actually sell but years ago in my early 20s, I came up with the idea for a beer coozie for 40oz bottles.
40s are great if you are poor and want just enough of a buzz but unless you chug them, they get warm halfway through. Which is also why 12oz cans/bottles are probably also more appealing.
Just a big ass coozie to keep your Bud Ice cold in a Sunday afternoon of porch drinking.
Had the ability to buy in on Google right after they went public - passed on it
Had the ability to buy in on Apple in the mid 1990s -passed
Had the ability to buy bitcoin at $5 a coin, could have put in $5k at the time -passed
Had the ability to buy in on Amazon shortly after they went public -passed
Ebay -passed
Starting to see a trend?
you had the opportunity to buy the winning lottery numbers last week and you BLEW IT
Quickly what was the last investment opportunity you were presented with?
Rivian
Nvidia about a year and a half ago
Damn lmk when the next one comes up
Can we subscribe to your opportunities, so we can invest?
Just $29.99 /month for my ideas. Please note I’m not an adviser just a guy putting his thoughts out there.
Let me know next time you decide to pass on a stock.
Will do
Congrats! You passed all your tests with flying colors.
I shall wear this badge with honor
inscription on badge “I’m a Moron”
One parent had a growing business when I was super young, they brought home well into the 6 figures. However two things happened 1: the internet started getting bigger so that started to hurt their business and 2: the 2008 housing crash happened and for a business that worked with banks on mortgages (I was too young to fully understand what the business did) it was fatal. Then we were dirt poor! The family never really recovered but after many years we did manage to get on our feet, then a parent died and shit went down hill again lmao.
I could’ve grown up a rich kid, instead I grew up with a family oats pot for meals. Though I’m probably a healthier grounded human for it.
2: the 2008 housing crash happened
My dad’s 50 year-old roofing business never fully recovered either, which is partly why I hate our government and how it works for the wealthy.
He now drives for DoorDash, at age 80, using my car. The alternative is starvation.
Well, isn’t it exciting? We may just witness a second crash! /S
But for real, it’s getting really bad again, it doesn’t seem sustainable and I honestly expected something to crack by now, but it hasn’t. The longer it gets delayed the worse it’s gonna be
There will be, no doubt.
The thing with crypto is to just add small amounts over time, so when those spikes happen you can take advantage. It’s pointless to try and time it.
I was talking about the housing climate, but crypto is fairly volitle too so I wouldn’t be surprised
Ah, yeah. Thanks for clarifying.
There has to be more to the story than that. Your parents probably didn’t disclose to you the other hardships they faced, whether they were self induced or not
Oh there definitely was as far as why the business went down, I just clipped it. But it caused one side of my family to be permanently removed from our lives as well. Though the increased stressors of the crash also aided in that whole deal
I bought Bitcoin in highschool. Not much, though, because it was just a neat concept. There was no reason it would actually skyrocket in value (still isn’t).
I had a teacher ask me for help investing in it, too. There was another guy in Canada at around the same time that turned that exact situation into a nice ponzi scheme.
Had about €5 in a prepaid credit card ready to buy bitcoin back when that got you a couple hundred of them. Website didn’t like the prepaid credit card, so I used it to buy something else (Runescape membership I think?).
Also gave up on Bitcoin mining after a few hours because I didn’t see the point back when anyone with a reasonable GPU could mine.
Realistically, I would’ve sold the moment this stuff would’ve become worth about a hundred bucks, but it’s nice to imagine what could’ve been.
Didn’t get “rich” per se, but I got in on dogecoin when it was at a penny, missed the peak, and ended up selling in the 30 cent range. I also picked up a ton of oil stocks in March 2020 when it bottomed out that I later sold for more than 15x their original value.
The irony is that I invested in dogecoin because Robbing Hood locked down investments into Gamestop. I didn’t realize that would be such a lucky development at the time.
Those investments paid off my student loans and got me a down payment on a condo. I still have five-figures in my investment account that I’m growing into early retirement. My current focus is gambling stocks, in large part because every election year it seems like there’s a smattering of states legalizing online sports betting. (MO and NE have it on the ballot for this year.)
Not fuck you money or ‘rich’, but life-changing.
Bro you got the “what could have been” ending
I didn’t quite get that but I am in a way better place than I expected to be thanks to those choices.
I don’t know about rich, but my household would be much more well off had my biological mother not been a mentally unstable gold-digging asshole.
My parents are fairly rich but stingy and boomers. I recently stood up for my principles and my kids and I give myself 1:6 odds they’ll cut me from the will as the last surviving child.
Back in 1988 I had a school project with a few people, one of whom came from a wealthy family. The project was regarding the stock market, and each team was given a certain amount of imaginary money to invest, to see who would win out at the end of the semester. My friend with the wealthy family came back with a recommendation from his father, of course, and we won the contest easily.
The recommendation? Put all our funds into Berkshire Hathaway.
I had the golden goose egg right in front of me and never invested a dime.
I had a similar school project around the same era. My wealthy grandfather suggested I invest in Phillip Morris. You should have seen the look on my teachers face when I bought the fake stock!. I actually ended up getting extremely into it and sold all of those “evil” fake stocks for an early tech company. I was quite certain it would do well, and I was right and I ended up winning the project by a wide margin. I tried to get my parent to let me use most of my savings account to buy real stock but they dismissed the idea because I was just a kid. It would have paid for my college education entirely if they had let me (they certainly didn’t help).
I was ready to drop $2,000 on AMD stock when it was $3 a share. Someone talked me out of it.
While it wouldn’t have made me “rich”, I’d be much better off than I am now.
Buying a bunch of AMD at 19 was my best trade. I haven’t sold.
You shouldn’t regret not gambling $2000 just because you saw it would’ve worked out.
… you should regret not gambling $200, “because fuck it.” If you’re really worried about any greedy investment, just lower the stakes.
Not super rich, but we’d be doing substantially better financially if this went differently.
The year: 2020. I was playing with the stock market and decided to buy 10,000 shares of the cheapest stock, just because it was funny to say I had 10k shares in anything. It cost about $800.
A couple of months later, lo and behold, my $800 was worth about $5000! “Holy shit,” I said, “I made money on penny stocks!” I promptly sold all of it.
Several months later, I check on it again. The company has announced new technology and its share price has skyrocketed, from a few cents per stock to $25. I could have made $250k, but instead made $5k.
This is the lesson I learned watching Bitcoin: cash out half.
well shit !
Were you already wealthy or just a gambler? For me the idea of throwing $800 on a random share just because it was the cheapest is unfathomable
Just a one off gamble aided by a cocktail of ADHD impulsiveness, COVID anxiety, and the stress of living in a 5th wheel with three cats, a dog, and my wife. We did some weird shit.
We were living with family and we had no rent/mortgage for a few months. We live in a high cost of living area, so not having that payment means having an extra $2k+ per month. I miss that part but not much else.
My condolences, that must sting.
Out of curiosity, what was the name of the company?
Rezolute. They’re a biopharma company.
Decided to OpenSource instead of Software Patent (as my employer was urging me). Nowadays, that technique is used in every decent Image CDN + compression tool. Still proud to see it everywhere. Maybe it wouldn’t have made it if had been patented.
You contributed something for the common good. You can be proud of your decision
You may not have gotten rich, but at least you can say on your resume that your technique is in every decent CDN + compression tool!
Without open sourcing it, it would probably been hard to market it and keep improving it though. Like if Linux was not open source project it probably would have had the same fate so many other OS before it had.
Nearly 30 years ago, I worked for a tiny li’l anti-virus software company that got acquired by one of the big boys, and everyone’s performance-based options they were holding were suddenly worth a lot. Being hungry for career growth at the time, I’d left the company and forfeited those options. Less than 6 months later, they announced the sale of the company.
My options woulda been worth a few million at the time, maybe double that in today’s money. Importantly, it would’ve set me up with a nice house, car, etc, without any debt, in my early 20s.
Not rich, but certainly comfortable.
I’m sorry but how is a couple million “not rich”
In my mind, rich means not having to work again. A couple million doesn’t even get close, sadly.
The word you’re looking for is “wealthy.”
I’d agree with this guy’s definition of rich
Please give me a couple millions.
What the hell is your lifestyle? The returns on an investment of 2 million dollars is like high 5 figures low 6 figures every year.
Here in Australia, it’s costing our family of five about $100k a year to live, excluding our mortgage. 4% return ($80K) is conservatively realistic here (for low risk investment), and still isn’t enough.
Like I said, while it would’ve set me up with a house and no debt, I’d still have to work to pay for the cost of living.
I wanted to buy $100 of bitcoin in HS and couldn’t figure out how. Would have been like $60,000,000 :ccc
Yeah I am so pissed about this too.
I had the money I was trying to convince my mum for months that I give her 100 dollars and she buys me a one time use card from the post office. She was convinced they could keep scamming more money from it somehow.
Today it’s still a sore topic when I visit her.
Millions and millions lost because my mum doesn’t know how a one time use card works
I have a similar story, except the people I asked about it convinced me it might be a scam. I bought some later, but it wasn’t the lifechanging amount it could’ve been.
