What can you do that screams, I make terrible financial decisions?

Oh, we've been dating for three months. Of course, let's join bank accounts.

You know those ads on Craigslist that are trying to sell a car for exactly what they paid for it?

Yeah, those. Take over my payments, please.

I used to work at GameStop. I had a customer that bought a PlayStation because a particular exclusive game came out for it.

Then they'd trade the system and game back in to buy an Xbox when a new exclusive came out for that about a month later,

and would go back and forth trading the respective consoles and games in every few months.

I tried to convince them just to own each system

and buy the games for each when they release because he was losing so much money doing what he was

doing. His response was that he couldn't afford to buy both at the same time. I didn't have the

brightest customers. I worked at a store called Vintage Stock. It's a lot like GameStop. We had people that did that for us too. We were in the same strip mall as GameStop, and we paid out less cash than they did. A guy came in saying he was playing our system by buying our cheap crap and selling it to GameStop, like buying a used PlayStation 4 from us for like 300 bucks, and selling it to GameStop for like 100 bucks instead of to us for 80.

Like you didn't make 20 bucks, you spent 200, dude. What the frick?

Buying something really expensive like a motorcycle or a nice rifle and then deciding you're tired of it

and reselling it for half the price only a week later. I knew a guy who did exactly that,

and it was astonishing. It's like, dude, you just lost thousands. Introduce me to this guy.

We're into the same stuff and I love a good deal. When you ask them how much they paid for

something and they only know how much it casts them in monthly payments. This is a great example. I didn't realize how many people must do this. I bought a truck years ago, and after test driving it, I told the salesperson that I'd buy it, if, after my trade-in, the loan on the new truck was 10K or less. He agreed. They wrote up my paperwork, and they said, Hey, the payment is only X amount. That's less than what you were looking for. Isn't that great? So I replied, yeah, but what's the total loan amount? Oh, I don't know. I'd have to look. So he digs through the documents and the loan was like 12K. I pretty much told them to get bent or take 2K off that loan amount. They ended up dropping it down to the 10k I'd told them I was willing to pay.

I'm assuming, however, that many people wouldn't have given the loan amount a second thought

after hearing the payment was lower than they were expecting.

This is why the narrator runs all of his biggest financial decisions past other, smarter

humans before he commits.

I'm too dumb to be trusted with this sort of thing, but also smart enough to know that I'm too dumb.

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