I joined a debt relief program. I sent them ALL the info. necessary and only had to make one payment to them a month and the calls stopped coming. At one point they even made a settlement on one of my debts. As time went on I accumulated another $3,200.00 toward another debt settlement. Well, one day I tried calling them about where my next settlement was at and I couldn't get in touch with them. After many days of calling I got a "this number has been disconnected". I know...you're thinking why didn't I contact the attorney general. I did but the hoops they wanted me to jump through were more than my loss was worth as far as I was concerned. Big loss, big lesson. And yes, I'm still in debt. Hopefully LV can guide me out of it.

I lost $100,000 in a ponzi scheme 8 years ago. Couldn't tell anyone except a couple friends. I learned a lot and moved on. Have been able to "resave" the entire $100k since then. Lesson learned.

I never learned about finances, I procrastinate dealing with them, and I didn't plan for the future.

I'm happily married and we have 2 extraordinary daughters (15 and 10 years-old). As a wife and Mom (and as a woman), my BIGGEST regret is our financial situation. I feel deeply ashamed yet each month as the bills arrive I procrastinate paying them and that makes me feel even worse. I knew this was partly due to lack of knowledge and experiences growing up, so I started searching the internet.

I found and joined LV to learn about and help me deal with our family's finances. Thanks to LV, a few months ago I started having $25 automatically transferred from my monthly paycheck to our new savings account (we didn't have one before). I talk to our girls about money and we discuss (age appropriately) the effect of my past experiences and decisions on our current situation because I don't want our girls to fear money or grow up to be in a similar situation. I've started creating the mental image of the financial picture I want for our family and taking steps to get there. It's really scary for me and out of my comfort zone, but I push myself to be strong, take it slow, and just do it.

When I was fresh out of college, my family asked me to co-sign all my my younger brothers college loans (3 boys, 3 big loans), and also asked me to put several of my family's land & home mortgages under my name - both to build my credit, and because my parents were facing financial issues. Bad idea, all around. My brothers have not been able to get jobs post-college, and therefore unable to pay their loans, so I'm getting the bill-collectors calling me. All the deeds under my name are now my responsibility, as my family went bankrupt, and I don't want it to (further) affect my credit. It's unfortunate, because I am otherwise very smart with my own money, I just didn't think anything of signing my name to things, as I trusted my family. They had no intention of doing anything wrong to me, they just needed help, and thought they'd be able to "fix it later". Lesson learned - don't sign your name to anything blindly, and be very careful about helping family with loans or finances.

Even though it helped me go abroad, I regret letting my parent talk me into putting the costs on a card with the promise of paying it off. Like mindi1020 said, trusting family with your credit is no good because they can run into their own financial problems.

In fact, if they're already in them, there's no way you could trust they'll make good on the debts that you take on for them. Now I have 5yrs worth of minimum payments or 3yrs of the minimum plus an extra hundred. I wonder how much my savings would be by now if I'd just waited until I really had the money.