Fastest Ways to go Broke: How You Can Save Money and Pain

Everyone has made a bad financial decision at some point in their life that they came to regret.

Here I am going to break down some of the fastest ways you can turn your hard earned cash into memories of the past and proper ways to save your money from an all too common fate. Let’s get right into it!

1. Gambling

If you want a surefire way to blow all your money within an hour, I can assure you gambling will take you there. You have those odds counters blasted all the way up on the underdog. Your $100 is looking like it’s about to return you $12,857.69 dollars.

The game ends and seemingly you’re out $100, oh but wait if you deposit another $50 they’ll match it and that’s like having your $100 all over again.

So you repeat the same song and dance but this time you’ll bet on the favourite, there’s no way they’ll lose. It’s a guaranteed victory and you’ll just pocket the easy winnings to make up for the loss.

Well another 60 minutes goes by and you’re now out $150 in two hours. Gambling is purely chance and the house always wins, the odds are never in your favour even if they try to sell you that they’re.

Don’t go nuts on scratch tickets either, that’s another great way to blow money each gas station and grocery trip. Because they get you into the same psychology of “just one more” you win one $5 ticket and all of a sudden you’re back again trying to buy more to get a chance at the jackpot.

Just don’t do it, save yourselves the money and get something you can actually use to improve your lives in the long term. Chasing short term gains will almost always bankrupt you in the long run.

2. Dining Out

Going out every once in a while won’t kill your bank account but if you’re consistently ordering takeout food everyday or dining at the fanciest restaurant in town. That is going to chew a hole right through your wallet.

It happened to me, I got sucked right into Uber Eats and all their promotions. I got food for a week straight and then realized I just spent nearly $300 on takeout.

If I had just saved that money and went and bought the same value in groceries. I would’ve had food for about two to almost 3 weeks. Then I had to go out and buy groceries, so it was a tough month of ramen and Kraft Dinner.

If you enjoy takeout, budget for it every month and stick to that amount. Don’t binge on it or make excuses to get it over groceries if you weren’t planning for it. You’ll be kicking yourself for it when you don’t have the money to buy healthier food at the store.

Another big downside to getting takeout consistently is that it’s bad for your health and I’m not going to act like your doctor because I’m not one. But I can tell you that people in my family and I have experienced problems because of bad habits related to takeout and junk food.

I want you all to live happy healthy lives, please enjoy the things you love, but in moderation.

3. Video Games

Now this is something I hate to admit, but I was addicted to video games. Ever since I was a kid it was my escape from whatever was going on. Fast forward 15 years and I’m in my 20s just getting over an addiction to getting new games or buying dlc’s for games I already owned.

Games can hook you into spending so much money especially if you have a couple of good friends who play, the minute they buy a new game you have to get a new one. I would work and save a part of my paycheck back when I was 18 just to buy games.

The most I spent within a month was $180 on games for both myself and my brother, on average I was spending $40-60 bucks every month added up over a year that’s $720. I could’ve spent that money on other things that would have brought me long term happiness.

The thing with gaming is you don’t just waste money on games, you waste your time when you could be doing things that bring you long term gains. All I did was stress out, play more games, get frustrated, switch games, go back to procrastinating, rinse and repeat.

What I do now is I study, I play board games, I go fishing, and I really enjoy making this blog, I don’t count this as work. Doing this brings me so much more happiness and fulfillment.

Disclaimer

I am not saying this is the case for everyone, this is just my own personal experience and I could not put the games down when I was playing. I would think about them after I was done playing and couldn’t wait for my next chance to get back on.

If you’re not like that and have a healthy relationship with them where they aren’t taking precious hours away from more urgent needs and tasks then by all means do it. But if you can’t do that and you’re throwing money down the drain over and over again maybe you should consider swapping them out with something healthier.

4. Spending Sprees

When I first started university I was working full time at a Canadian Tire to get through all my school expenses. This store had an employee discount and an “As Is” rack where things were 50-75% off depending on what was wrong or missing with the item.

Well as a guy who loves doing maintenance and working on his car, it was the best and worst place I could’ve ever worked at. Yes, I got great deals on a lot of tools that I don’t regret but I also blew all my money that I saved, quite often, because a new item that I really wanted ended up in the rack.

For example I bought a knife set that was MSRP $250 and it was down to about $50, so I bought it. The very next day a mechanic set that was usually between $550-780 dollars was going for $175 I bought that too.

This process happened very often to the point where I had to walk the opposite way around the rack so I wouldn’t see it anymore. This goes for anything be cautious of how much you’re spending, deals are great and all but set a hard a limit and respect it.

What to do Instead

Now what I do is, I’ll budget every month how much I want to spend on miscellaneous items and that could be anything like fishing lures, boardgames, takeout, etc and I stick to it.

What you can do is take your monthly income and tell yourself you’re only going to spend 3-5% of it and that’s what you stick to every month.

Another thing you can do to alleviate the burden of spending too much on necessities is to take advantage of ongoing deals and coupon codes. I talk more about this in my article of how I saved money as a student.

The path to financial freedom is through discipline, planning and a willingness to learn.

5. Maintenance

Having your own transportation is great, when everything works the way it should. I can tell you the biggest expenses I have had to fork money out for all pertained to the maintenance and condition of my vehicle.

I was driving back from my mom’s place to get to a student board meeting and on the way to school just as I was about to get over this massive hill. My car revved all the way through in the redzone, I had no more power going down to the wheels, the dash lit up like a christmas tree and I had a semi truck right on my bumper.

Well I was a very happy camper as my car just barely made it over the hill and I had enough time to pull off to the right so the semi wouldn’t turn me into a crinkled ball of fiberglass. I was forced to call a tow truck, this was $320 to get to the nearest garage that would take my car. I had to get a taxi back and forth from the garage another $120 and then the grand total of my busted clutch came out to $1,450 dollars.

For one day of misfortune it put me out $1,890 dollars. That’s only one story of my car repair disasters.

The worst part about it was that I had been saving up a good amount of money for a while and that little incident sent me back almost 3 months worth of savings.

Word of Wisdom

Take care of your vehicle, do regular maintenance. Regular maintenance right now might cost you $100-400 dollars. But if it’s not done in a timely manner, that number can grow exponentially into some kind of catastrophic failure that’ll cost you in the thousands.

Better to be safe than sorry folks.

Thank You!

I wanted to thank you all for reading this post. I hope my experiences will help you out and that you’ll learn something from them. Expect plenty more to come! Drop what was the worst thing you ever blew your money on down in the comments!