Many Americans regretted not handling their money differently last year, a new survey says.
A majority of respondents (83%) said they had financial regrets from 2018, up from 76% a year earlier, according to Student Loan Hero, a subsidiary of online lending marketplace LendingTree that commissioned an online survey of 1,022 Americans in July.
The biggest missteps Americans said they made was taking on credit card debt (59%); not saving enough (47%); overspending on non-essentials (34%); not paying off as much debt as they wanted (27%); and wishing they had invested more (14%).
Nearly half of respondents (48%) think they need to cut back on going out to eat, and nearly a fifth (17%) of those who bought a car last year regretted the purchase, said Student Loan Hero.
While some Americans regretted purchases they didn’t need, others struggled to save for purchases they did need. For example, 18% of respondents were saving for a car; 15% wanted to go on vacation, 7% were saving for college, and over one-quarter (27%) needed to save enough to buy a home.
Saving too little and spending too much weren’t the only regrets American had in reflecting on their expenditures in 2018. Some Americans (11%) regretted not paying their bills on time, while 7% said they made a bad career decisions, the survey said. The same percentage of respondents (4%) said they regretted buying a big-ticket item they couldn’t afford or making a bad investment.
When it comes to shopping, one-fifth (21%) of Americans said they needed to cut back on purchases of clothing and shoes, and nearly one in five respondents said they wished they hadn’t spent so much on cigarettes.
Other shopping regrets included buying alcohol (17%); buying cell phones or paying costly cell phone bills (16%); going to the movies (12%); binging on grocery shopping (12%); buying coffee (10%); subscribing to streaming services (9%); gambling (9%); traveling (9%); and buying bottled water (8%).
More than one in three estimated they had wasted more than $5,000 in the past year—money they wished they could have used for other purposes, such as a retirement account (21%); buying a home (20%); purchasing a car (14%); traveling the world (12%); investing in stocks (10%); starting a business (7%); getting married (3%); or having children (2%).