Money comes and goes, and when you consider the fact that more than half, or 58%, of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck, saving becomes as important as ever. This usually starts with cutting down on unnecessary spending.
To find out what people can do without, Redditor u/gejiw94601 made a post on r/AskReddit earlier this month, asking everyone, "What's the biggest waste of money?" Since then, it has received over 2.6k comments, prompting a discussion on our budgeting, spending habits, and everything inbetween. Here are some of the most popular answers to their question.
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Weddings.
Crazy expensive day. Guaranteed at least one relative will kick up a stink. Massive pressure to be The Happiest Day of Your Life. Everything doubles in cost if you say its for a wedding (dress, suit, cake, venue)
Just do the quick registry office paperwork, have a surpise party and run away for a long honeymoon with the money you saved.
who did come up with the saying that this is supposed to be the "happiest day of your life" anyway? I can think of a dozen other days immediately which are far more life-changing. Come to think of it, does anything really change when you get married? Your daily life just goes on as it did before.
Those that are donated to house of worships, for pastors to buy private jets & catholic priest to play dress up
Cigarettes. $13+ for a pack of cancer
Giving your money to the Catholic Church. You’ve got to be f*****g kidding me.
I'm not in accord with this. I have plenty to say against my late priest as he didn't have time for his seminarists, but he always donated everything he could to the poors. Everyone who need something and went to his door got whatever he had, to the point that the local Charitas had a discussion with him because often he was tricked by conmen. The same Charitas help a lot of people, often people that didn't want any help to maintain the appearance, so they are helped in secret. A falling tree makes more noise than an entire growing forest
Donating to rich twitch streamers. I’ll probably never understand why people do it.
How about that time people donated to Kylie Jenner so she could be the youngest ever (“self-made” 😂) billionaire?
Buying pro-grade stuff you don't need is wasted money. My dad once told me to not spend excessive money on tools at first. Buy them for dirt cheap, learn which tools you really need, and when they break, replace them with quality ones.
Diamond rings.
I too like sparkly....and then I see the price tag.
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buy lab created diamonds, pennies on the dollar, and just as sparkly
I have a diamond tester, and my moissonite shows up as a diamond (10 hardness level).
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Agreed. The DeBeers family and ALROSA sell over 50% of the world's diamonds. They can intentionally cause a shortage (and raise the price). They have also supported legislation that prevent artificial diamonds from being sold by jewelers. These can be made much cheaper.
So true. Here, they don’t even have resale value and you never know if it is real or not. Waste of money really
Lab made diamonds are cheaper and look like the real thing as well as not being "blood diamonds", IE mined in areas of conflict.
About as arbitrary as FIAT currency, gold, crypto, tulips. Time is the currency we should be concerned about.
I LOVE my cz rings! I change up my wedding ring all the time. Dream land jewelry has amazing ones for under $60
Diamonds and gold are a good long term investment.....just not correlated to relationships/engagements.
I'm not a gem expert but to me diamonds are the most nondescript gem ever. Unless you hold it at the right angle in the right light it's just a semi transparent rock.
Diamonds were falsely reported to be rare and scarce to inflate the price
Totataly (sp) disagree! When the rlation implodes u still a great ring. Plus u can always sell it
My friend tried to sell her ring when she called off the engagement. She and her then partner had paid for it together and it cost £600. When they looked into selling it they were told they'd get about £100. Maximum. The mark-up is crazy
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Cryptocurrency.
It is fake money and only has value so long as people believe in it. It has become a way to scam people out of money. Incidentally values have dropped from about $3 trillion to about $1 trillion. So someone other than investors is getting rich. Also does not have the regulations of stocks.
Celebrity meet and greets.
I have a friend who is not very well off financially, and is complaining about money to me once a week. Yet she always seems to have money to pay for a celebrity meet and greet at least twice a year. Some of them are only a couple hundred dollars, but some can get really expensive, really fast. For what? A picture next to a famous person? They neither know you, nor do they care about you.
Overdraft fees. Like, the bank should know better than anybody that I have no money. So what are you trying to take?
And some banks charge an extra $5-$10 everyday your account is in the negative. This is why I switched to a credit union. The overdraft for mine is $12, but they won't let you get into the negative to begin with and sometimes they'll forgive the overdraft.
Third-party delivery i.e. DoorDash/Uber Eats/GrubHub
The fees + tips are exorbantly high, and a normally affordable fast food meal becomes the price of a sit-down restaurant meal or more.
This is from first hand experience lol
You have the option to spend time to get the food yourself, or spend money to have someone else get it for you. So it depends on whether you value your time more or less than your money
Gold Food, or more accurately food that are covered in something called gold leaf. In my eyes, food are worth buying if they provide a great amount of nutrition for considerably good prices. After all, you probably avoid paying 50 million dollars just to buy a few molecules that are useless to your health and needs
And then there's gold leaf food, sure the food looks fancy but at the cost of ludicrous amount of money! And with the gold having no usable nutrients at all, it just not worth it to buy such expensive food for relatively small amount of nutrients
For instance, Industry Kitchen(hopefully that's the name of the place) at NYC serves a pizza with a gold leaf covering for a whopping price of $2000. While at my home country which is Indonesia, Domino's serves an American Classic Cheeseburger Pizza(idk that's a thing) which is the most expensive pizza I could find on the website costs around $7 which is just baffling to me
An entire gold leaf (8x8cm or 10x10cm) costs around 1 euro/1 dollar. The small part used to decorate a cake, a pastry or whatever in a dish costs only a few cents. You are definitely not paying for the gold added. And stop with the b******t about nutrition, it’s purely a cheap (yes cheap) decoration, it’s not about feeding you. Then if you’re stupid enough to buy a $2000 pizza you’re a moron, it’s not about the gold leaf.
Cod points or any other online game currency bs. Yeah its cool at first but meh after you realize you spent $20 for basically nothing.
Ugh. I feel for this recently. And am not proud to admit it. A stupid mobile game no less. But the chests were so tempting. And it made my character stronger. Sigh.... I spent about 200$... :( lol
Bottled water.
Go to anywhere in central America, most anywhere in SE Asia, Flint Michigan.....drink the water from the faucet and then come back the next day (as your guts bubble and you struggle not to shít yourself) and mention how useless bottled water is.
Fireworks, i love them, but it's like 50$ per second for the good ones.
Traumatize and terrify your pets, the war veterans in your community, and all the wildlife nearby for just $50/second!!!
Any dating apps subscription - like find out who liked you now for only a billion dollars!
Tipping.
Note: this post originally had 44 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Personally I would put Jordans everyone is flexing them and why would you spend a lot of something on your feet
Timeshares. It starts out nice then the maintenance fees take over until you're paying more than what the week costs. And you're stuck for life paying unless you are able to get free of it.
You guys missed one: psychics. I feel really bad for people who pay a bunch of money to see a psychic. It is kind of the same as church. If you're emotionally vulnerable people will find a way to get money out of you..
shoes, iPhones, insurance are a must-have but you can literally invest in anything better than bitcoin
Load More Replies... Personally I would put Jordans everyone is flexing them and why would you spend a lot of something on your feet
Timeshares. It starts out nice then the maintenance fees take over until you're paying more than what the week costs. And you're stuck for life paying unless you are able to get free of it.
You guys missed one: psychics. I feel really bad for people who pay a bunch of money to see a psychic. It is kind of the same as church. If you're emotionally vulnerable people will find a way to get money out of you..
shoes, iPhones, insurance are a must-have but you can literally invest in anything better than bitcoin
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