Best finacial decision?

[genchan]

I've noticed that a lot of people on this board have gone through hard times and come out on top and some are in the process, but have come a long way. I want to know what is the best financial decision you made to learn from your experience?

[DivaJen]

Dh and I haven't had to overcome anything financially, really, but I'll share what has turned out to be one of our better moves. Back in 1996-1997, we were socking away quite a bit of money each month from each of our paychecks, to pay for our wedding (we were paying for it all ourselves). A house came up for sale in just the neighborhood we wanted to eventually live in. Long story short, our wedding savings turned into a down payment, and we had a very nice wedding in our backyard. Now, houses in this area have easily double and even tripled in value, so we have a nice amount of equity built up. We also got into the market before things went nuts. I don't know if we could buy anything now, and have me at home with DD.

One other thing we did was put 75% of an inheritance into less liquid savings, keeping the other 25% very liquid - we inherited the money around the time DH was working for a dot.com that went belly up, and I was on a medical leave (partial to full bedrest for most of the seven months I was pregnant) from work collecting disability. We managed to get through that without amassing any debt. Since then we've got more than the original 75% socked away.

[kzz]

Learn to live on what's coming in.

Several years ago I was injured at work. For the first 6 months I rec'd regular pay (worker's comp + disability income) but for the next 8 months I only rec'd the worker's comp. This meant we had to live on DH's salary and 33% of my old salary. We did just fine and it taught us alot of living frugally from then on.

[crosses]

I received an inheritance about 25 years back and although we thought about using it at that time, we put it all into the stock market at that time. It's become the foundation of our retirement. I would hate to see where our retirement plans would be had we decided to spend that money.