I'm posting this now, because i just had to furtively slink on in to my local CitiFinacial office and make my exorbitant monthly payment.

Answering their letter in the mail offering me a loan of X amount and then walking into their office and signing on for it is my second biggest regret (the biggest being ever having used credit in the first place) . If i wanted to pay the bloody thing out now, I'd have to pay far more than the original principal even after nearly a year's worth of payments!!!!!

Finance companies are the worst predators out there (other than, possibly payday lenders) . In addition to the horrific rates they charged me (they got me on the hook in a moment of panic) I fully believe that getting a loan with them is a primary reason why I can't get credit anywhere else. When I came to my senses, I applied for several 0% interest credit cards, so I could transfer the balance over and reduce my payments, and was turned down flat by all of them. I finally got wise and wanted to correct the mistake as best as i could, and nobody will let me!

I even asked my current bank for an increas on my LOC to pasy this monster off, and they too wouldn't let me.

The only solution I can think of for this is to spend 6 months paying down current debt and trying again for the LOC increase or the 0% credit card. (I know, I swore I'd never borrow again, but in this case, it would just be so i could get out of Citifinacial, as a temproary stopgap measure.)

Can anyone offer any suggestions? The only thing Citi will offer me as a way to reduce it would be to roll it over into a secured loan with a lien on my house... Thanks, but no thanks.

I don't quite understand all the details of your loan, but it seems that either you have an really high interest rate and/or you have incurred fees from over the limit or late payment fees. Do you have an car that you can use as collateral? I think to offer collateral may be the only way you can get your interest rate down right now. If you don't want to do that you can put every last cent available into paying this loan down, and after 6 months, I would first go to CitiBank and ask them to reduce your interest rate, if they won't then get your FICO score before you start applying for credit card offers.

My biggest financial mistake was probably purchasing my new car. I had been looking at new cars, but couldn't bite of the huge amount of money, but then my DH got into a car accident and his car was totaled and we needed another car quickly because our insurance company was pulling out funding of the rental. We took the plunge, and while I like my car, it is just not worth the $30,000 that I spent. I would much rather have bought a car 2-3 years old, but I thought I "deserved" the car because I never had a new car. I won't do it again. It is just a hugh waste of money to me for a depreciating asset.

you can opt out of prescreened offers of credit so you don't have the temptation ever again at optoutprescreen.com. our mail volume dropped 99% when we did that, which is just a fringe benefit of not having the offers available for someone else to steal or whatever.

personally, my biggest mistake was not shopping around for a better finance rate on our first ever car loan. ignorance teaches a hard lesson sometimes. by the time we refinanced the thing, we'd already incurred most of the total interest we paid on the car... at the 7 month mark.

I've made so many financial mistakes it would be hard to figure out which was the biggest, but the one that's currently occupying my mind is one I'm currently faced with: as a first-time homebuyer last year I took advantage of the Roth IRA first-time homebuyer provision, which allows you to withdraw up to $10K of your earnings toward your first home. It helped, as we didn't have quite enough for our targeted 20% downpayment. I had two IRAs that I couldn't contribute to anymore (because I now live in Canada), and together their total value was about $11K so I cashed them in.

However, while I correctly determined that this wouldn't have any effect on my US tax liability, I didn't think about the fact that it would count as income on my Canadian taxes. And since I'm in the highest marginal tax bracket in Canada, it turns out this will cause me to owe more than $5,000 in Canadian income taxes. My accountant gave me the bad news yesterday.

If on the other hand I had used the similar first-time homebuyer provision in my Canadian RRSP account, it wouldn't have counted as income and I wouldn't have had to pay any tax on it. Live and learn...the hard way.

Biggest mistake was just in waiting 10 years out of college before starting to really care about money. Easy come, easy go, hey lets go Vegas sort of life. Makes me shudder to think how much in future earnings I've squandered by waiting to start savings in earnest. What really gets me is from what I now know, I could have still had all the fun I wanted and saved responsibly as well, I just didn't know or care enough about it to do it ... like Brad said, live and learn ...

My top 5 mistakes, not necessarily by order of magnitude:
1. My undergrad major
2. My ex-boyfriend
3. Leveraging in November 2000
4. Waiting to buy a home until early 2004
5. The home I bought in early 2004.

My best financial (and life?) decisions:
1. My undergrad and my MBA
2. My husband
3. Buying a home in 2004, renovating and flipping it
4. Buying the home I have now
5. Starting my own business(es)

My worse was selling off part of my rental housing and going into the ever rising market in 1998 , left something I understood well and into something I didn't really understand, the worse financial mistake I ever made was letting someone talk me into buying stock in AOL when it was going up every day and I invested $18,000 and in about five or six weeks it was close to $30,000 and I sold ,man that was easy money I said to myself and there after I sold off some housing and went into the market and the wheels of the market began to wobble I lost $ thousands of dollars on Disney because I bought it at the top . A person should stay with what they understand .

Stupidest financial mistakes:

1) ex-girlfriend
2) forex

Hard to say.

There are stupid financial mistakes I made, but I recognize that I made the decision with the best info available at the time. (Buying a home in an area near my family. At the time my dad was sick, my mom needed help, and I knew I'd need my family's help with my new baby. But over the long term, the 2+ hour daily commute took too much out of me.)

There are also stupid financial mistakes I made, but I made them for a reason beyond finances. (Taking on a big mortgage for a new home close to work, but I did it so that I would have 2 more hours every day with my kids. The mortgage payment hurts, but it is worth it to have time and energy to play with my children)

In the end I prefer to focus on my financial successes: knowing enough not to cosign loans with my first husband; trying to be a good steward of my personal financial resources and not live beyond my means.

Buying a Dell Computer for $3,300 without realizing that they were charging me 20% APR. I learned about the credit problem real quick. Since then, I never buy computers on credit.

Credit Cards in College. Stupid stupid stupid.
Not learning about finance until I'd already dug a huge hole.
A far as finance was concerned... having my wife move to Chicago rather than me moving to St. Louis when we got married. It was still the right decision from many other standpoints, but as a financial decision, it was bad.

Overspending on credit cards when I was in college. Fortunately I suspected it might happen, so the card's limit was only 300 dollars. Still...

Two words: Credit Cards.

DWI and spending way too much on an undergraduate degree that doesn't pay anywhere near what the education costs.

Icky spoiled boyfriend, not growing up and taking responsibility for myself, not discovering Strattera earlier, and not UTILIZING my B.A.