Best and Worst Financial Decisions

This has been the theme of a great series of posts over at the M-network (highly recommended reading, by the way), and it has started me thinking on decisions that I’ve made.

What defines the “worst decision”, I wonder?  Certainly the decision that I regret most was the decision to sell our flat in Brighton 13 or so years ago.  It was about 50 yards away from the station, next to the best Blues pub in town.  We bought it for £27,000 in 1992, and sold it for £32,000 in 1994.  At the time, the man-in-the-street didn’t know about buy-to-let mortgages, so we sold it and moved nearer to Tim’s new job.  In retrospect, it was a highly rentable property, and I watched one of those “house auction” programmes on tv the other day.  The flat 6 doors up from ours was auctioned off – it was much smaller, a weird layout and really messed up.  It fetched £126,000.

*Sigh*

However, at the time we didn’t feel like it was much of a decision – back then I thought that if you needed to move, then you had to sell your property first, and Tim had already had one serious car accident because of the amount of time he was commuting and his level of exhaustion.  So it didn’t feel like a choice – it felt like something we had to do.

As far as *decisions* go, I think my worst one was probably buying my first Macintosh computer at college.  I loved the computer and it made my college work much easier, but…  I took out a loan for it.  A loan which I just consolidated when I got into trouble, again and again.  All in all, it took me something like five years to pay off that damn computer.  Which wouldn’t have been such an issue, had I not already had a computer which could have done the job (Amstrad PCW – remember those?).  But I wanted the latest gadget…  Bad move, Annie.  I think I’ve learned from that one!

Best decision is pretty easy for me, although it looked a bit mad at the time: the decision to give up my life in the City, move to the countryside and start making pickles, baking cakes and laughing more.  I think it was 2001 when we finally saw how bad our situation was, and how it wasn’t showing any signs of improving.  We were both unhappy in our jobs (Tim’s was high-stress, and whilst mine was great, I felt torn between my duties as a mother and as an employee), living in debt and struggling to make ends meet.  After a LOT of financial flailing around, I had a moment of Perfect Clarity, when I realised that the answer to everything was to say “Bollox!” to the lot of it and start anew, doing something that we actually *wanted* to do.   So we rented out our house, bought a derelict one in the right area, Tim started working in the family building firm, and I stayed home to look after the kids.  Stress levels went down, debt levels went down (eventually!) and quality of life shot straight up.  Whilst we do struggle sometimes on a day-to-day basis, it’s because we’ve sunk so much money into our businesses and property.  On paper, we are doing Just Fine, Thankyou.  And even when it gets a bit tough, it doesn’t take too much reminding to get me back to realising how blessed I really am, because we took that financial chance.

What are YOUR best and worst financial decisions?