I’m 45. These 6 Money Mistakes Cost Me Years.

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]I have made tons of financial mistakes over the course of my life. And when I look back at some of the ones that I made, I just get a little bit disappointed at myself because now that I know better, I just think back at some of the decisions that I made, and I often wonder like, what what was I thinking?

[00:00:21]Well, in today's video, I'm going to be going over six financial mistakes that I made throughout the course of my life, and what I wish I would have done differently instead of making those mistakes with the hopes that anyone that's watching this doesn't make the same mistakes that I did.

[00:00:40]Now, the very first mistake was waiting too long to invest in the stock market.

[00:00:46]Where I come from, nobody knew about the stock market. The only thing that we knew is that you don't invest because it doesn't work for us. It only works for the select few, the elite, and anybody else that puts their money in there is actually just better off just going to casino cuz you're going to lose money either way. See, that's what I thought.

[00:01:06]We were pretty much told horror stories about why investing doesn't work. And now that I look back on it, I realized most of the people that used to say these things to me had no idea how to invest, [snorts] how the stock market worked, or actually how to build wealth. And I don't blame them for that, right? Because this is generational. One of the things that I've noticed as I've continued to progress over life is that if you're not teaching your kids when they're young certain things, especially when it comes to money, they're going to grow up with habits that are formed by what they see, especially now with social media, and what they hear from people, and nine times out of 10, I believe that that information is wrong. The second mistake that I made is I stayed way too long in the first professional job that I got out of college. I started out working in a pharmaceutical company back in the 2000s.

[00:02:07]It's a generic pharmaceutical company.

[00:02:09]The pay was was great. I mean, I was making more money than I had ever made at any point throughout my life.

[00:02:17]But, I got to a point to where I was stagnant. There was no growth.

[00:02:21]The pay slowed and so did the career progression, but I stayed because I thought that's what you were supposed to do. Back at that time most people were staying at companies and for their entire career and were retiring from there. And a lot of the people that were at this pharma company, they were there for 20, 30, 40 years. So, the culture was, "Hey, you get a job here and this is where you stay."

[00:02:49]And I fell into that trap. I stayed for around 12 years.

[00:02:53]And whenever I left my career started to flourish. So, if you're at an organization right now, you're [snorts] a little stagnant from a career perspective or even from an earning perspective make sure you're taking a look at the market, benchmarking your skills versus what's out there in the job market, and move accordingly.

[00:03:12]The third mistake that I made was not going to a junior college or a community college before I transitioned to a four-year degree. So, I didn't have scholarships or my parents couldn't pay for me to go to college and I did what most people do is you go into a tremendous amount of student loan debt and it pretty much shackles you to that career or that town or that job and it's so hard for you to get out of it.

[00:03:41]If I could go back and do this all over again I would go to a community college or a junior college where the cost is a fraction of what it cost for you to go to a traditional four-year institution and I would do my electives there. So, if I wanted to get a degree in engineering, for example, I would go to the local community college. I would find out what courses actually transferred over to the institution that I ultimately wanted to get to and I would take my electives there to make sure I could do that the most cost-efficient way possible. Whenever I graduated from college, I had around $40,000 in student loan debt. Not a lot by today's measure, but back then, it was a tremendous amount. And it took me around 10 years to pay off my student loans. I hustled and grind for 10 years to pay it off. I probably could have paid it sooner, but I likely could have just cash flowed my way through junior or community college and took out a very small amount of student loans in order to graduate.

[00:04:42]The fourth mistake that I made was leaving way too much money in a savings account. Before I understood from a financial perspective how I was supposed to invest my money and where my money was supposed to be to make sure it was working on my behalf at all times, I had money in a savings account. 30, 40, up to $50,000 at times in a savings account. And we're not talking about a high-yield savings account. We're talking about just a regular standard savings account. And at that time, it was earning maybe a half of a percent of interest, probably less.

[00:05:16]And I had money in there for years losing value because, as we know, inflation is 3 to 4% on average, and if I'm getting a half of a percent on my money, my money is losing value by the day.

[00:05:32]I just didn't know any better. The next bad financial decision that I made, um unfortunately, a lot of people fall into this bucket, was I got into credit card debt. I got in in my early 20s and it took me almost the entirety of my 20s to get myself out of credit card debt because I didn't understand how to actually accelerate that process.

[00:05:53]And I paid dearly for it. And now that I look back and I think about, I actually purchased things that I didn't even need to impress people that I didn't even like, I can't do anything else other than laugh at where my mindset and my head was at at that point in time.

[00:06:12]But that's a real thing. A lot of people that get themselves into credit card debt, they buy one thing, they buy two things, and before they know it, it's out of control, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to pay it back. And the last terrible financial decision that I made is I waited so long to actually get a mentor.

[00:06:33]So, I talked about on previous videos where in corporate America, I was lucky enough to have a few people that I considered to be mentors. And early on in my uh professional career, they tried to to get involved and to mentor me, but I resisted it for reasons that are unknown. I think that whenever we are in situations where we're earning money for the first time, we resist people telling us what we should and shouldn't do because we feel like we made it.

[00:07:08]We have that real corporate job, we're making real money.

[00:07:11]What can they tell me that I don't already know?

[00:07:15]And not listening to those people earlier on in my career cost me years.

[00:07:22]I go back to how I had money in a savings account for years that shouldn't have been there.

[00:07:28]Had I been listening to or to uh the people that I considered mentors, that would have never been the case.

[00:07:35]Guys, these are six things, six financial mistakes that I made over the course of my life that had I not made them, I'd be so much further ahead from a financial perspective than I am today.

[00:07:48]Now, look, we all can go back and say we woulda, shoulda, coulda. I think that's the story in the life for most people.

[00:07:55]But, I wanted to create this video in the hopes that somebody would see this and it'll prevent them from either making the same mistakes that I did, or if they did make the same mistakes, figure out how to help themselves get out of it.

[00:08:08]Leave a comment down below. Let me know what you guys think. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.