So when the dust settled I was out a little over $20.00 and had nothing.

I never saw any reference to a restocking fee (small print?) when I purchased it.

wii owns
games 50$
gamecube comatable
controler 30$
awsm games like ssb brawl, mad world, house of the dead overkill, res. eval umbrella cronicals
plus free online (it sux thou)

Horray for Regret.

It seems to me you need to buy a Wii. Little Big Planet is a kid game and Wii only has crap like that.

Couple of hundred to fix the exhaust. Same with some oil leaks and oil pan gasket etc. Then the clutch gave way. The sunroof malfunctioned. Had to manually shut it and duct tape the button so nobody would accidentally hit it. Right headlight won't rise. Then finally the transmission. Quoted at over 600+tax.

Man I wish sony would die in a fire.

2.) Our condo. At the time, it seemed a good idea to purchase and pay a mortgage for less than what people were renting for. Big mistake. Sure telling people you have a mortgage and own your own place at 23 seems awesome...until you want to move back to California and realize you owe more on the stupid condo than you could ever hope to sell it for.

3.) Our purebred German Shepard. I should have known to go to a shelter, and I see this as my punishment for not having done so. This dog is the worst dog I have ever owned in my life. 14 months old, ill-tempered, has accidents in the house to spite, snaps at us, climbs on furniture, burst a huge hole in the bathroom door, ripped carpet from the door all the way across the bedroom to the opposite wall, broke two muzzles, ate his shock collar, demolished his kennel, and barks INCESSANTLY for no good damn reason (making all of our neighbors loathe us). This, after $1200.00 obedience classes, $800.00 vet bills, $30.00 bags of dog food a week, numerous destroyed toys, and several other expenses later. We're finally doing what we should have done months ago the first time he snapped at us. It makes me sad, but he's become dangerous despite all attempts to help him.

Live and learn I suppose.

That's insane. You probably should have (besides not doing any of this, obviously) just toughed out the payments on the Lexus for awhile. Would have been cheaper... sort of.

@JasperCadillaxing: Where did you get your info that Woot is Buy.com? Woot is registered as a private corperation owned by Matt Rutledge.

It's a worthless piece of crap.

One good thing is I think it's from before the days that the printer companies became evil. If a cartridge is low it complains, but prints anyway. If one color is low it just prints using the other colors -- if it's something that the exact colors don't really matter for (like a Google map) it's fine.

(Totally joking by the way.)

@bishophicks:
Egg cookers are awesome, too.

As for the shirts, there was only really about ten. They were donated. I should hope in doing so I didn't sour your notion of my being a dick.

Best of luck to you.

Feel free to transfer it my way!

What's your PSN ID? Let's play some SSIITHDR! (View my profile for my ID.

Ironically, I mostly use my wii for Virtual Console titles.

My boob job. Seriously. I was young when I HAD to get them and put the $5000 surgery on a credit card ten years ago, which I'm sure I'm still somehow paying for. I picked the doctor based on the fact that she was the CHEAPEST (I know, I know - I was young.) She didn't do that great of a job. Lesson learned: don't pick a plastic surgeon based on the fact that there's a coupon in the yellow pages.

I ended up having some kind of crazy infection that ended up clearing up, but the doctor could only explain it "that they only see this in people who smoke huge amounts of pot on a daily basis." I've never smoked in my life.

So now, ten years later, I have to get the implants replaced (it's recommended every 10 years or so.) So I guess that's going to be a lifetime commitment and having them completely removed isn't an option because of what would be left (not pretty). Plus side: I'm going to have the hottest 70-year-old boobs on the block.

So I went from cute perky ones for free to a lifetime commitment which includes surgery every 10 years or so at $6-7k a pop and 1 in 5000 chance of dying on the table. Yay.

Should have went with the college education...

As I'm buying this year's gifts and getting everything done under $100, I'm regretting the hundred I spent per person for years before. I felt like they'd take it as some kind of sign of negativity if I didn't buy them something nice, and also I never bought for myself so it was fun to have license to buy for once, so I went crazy at christmas. Well. We all were young, right?

I also regret every time I bought something for four dollars at a thrift store because "it's cheap and it ALMOST fits" or "I'll probably read it, if it's already in my room." I haven't spent a fortune doing this, because it is $4 here and here, but it's annoying I did it at all.

Best Purchase: 2004 Hyundai Accent GT. KBB = $8500 when we bought it 6 months ago. Paid $5500. They even threw in a new battery, replaced the broken cupholders, and fixed the sticky rear hatch latch. That's what happens when you're an engineer, your mom is an accountant, and your dad is a high-end salesperson.

Only problem so far was that Jiffy Lube told me the transmission fluid had never been changed in the poor car's life, so I was out 70 bucks on that. But, compared to the money I saved and the gas money I'm STILL saving ($16 lasts me 2 weeks now!), I don't mind a bit. I take care of the car, and he takes good care of me :)

Cuisinart Grind and Brew coffeemaker. I have to clean it every damn day or it stops working. I hate it.

By the way, you don't have to be a dick...but if it comes naturally, go for it.

i probably know where you can get replacements or aftermarket equivalents for the batteries

or would ya consider donating it to a poor e-bike enthusiast who could use the motor and electronics or just fix it up for a (gasp) actual mode of transportation. ?

A week after I gave it to her a small stone fell out, which the guy replaced free of charge. Fast forward to last month and three small stone fell out. I took it back and he blamed it on some chemical that was eating at the gold. Um, my fiancee is an accountant and doesn't use anything that harsh to clean her apartment.

Dude doesn't do refunds, only store credit, so I figured I'd try and sell it. It's a nice looking ring if you see it head on, but jewelers are telling us we got hosed because this dude had some shoddy craftsmanship.

Next time I'm just gonna go with a chain. I don't care if people say their stones aren't as good quality, they at least have a guarantee of some sort.

I always regret buying cigarettes, but the nicotine always calls my name. I always say that my next purchase will not be a cartoon of smokes, but the gum or patch. Never happens.

@pirate_eggie: If it is the same tiny little Coby dvd player then my wife bought the same model from a grocery store also but for only $20. I figure that it is probably the same chassis as a PC dvd player but with an outside case, electrics.

We eventually moved the Coby to work a little TV/VCR combo unit (which I fished from a trash dumpster in complete working condition) that my sons watch in their room. This TV/VCR combo unit was probably trashed as someone broke off the standard cable attachment on the back. I run the Coby DVD player to it via the white/yellow audio/video inputs on the front of the tv.

Bingo for DVD on the dumpster TV/VCR.

And that answer is still somehow less disturbing than all the people who insist that they regret purchasing their wives.

Cable. For all these years.

Worthless, except for the every-two-weeks keg party in the law school courtyard and the Sunday softball games (which I will pay for in a few years with skin cancer on my neck, which always got sunburned).

@segamanxero: this made me lol.

Let the buyer scams continue!

@GirlCat: Attended an electronics retailer show and scored two Woot Monkeys for my sons. Too much noise for the apartment so they were exiled to my car. The monkeys are now in a bag of toys in the back seat floor of my car. If the car hits certain sized bumps at certain speeds the monkeys start yelling. Luckily not alot of new people ride around in the car to be freaked out by the noise...

Geez Ben, your original post says it all, so I will reiterate it here:

For me it would have to be the Wii. I never play the damn thing anymore, the graphics blow, and all its vaunted interactivity is really incredibly basic after the magic wears off (wake me when it's gyroscopic). It might be different if my [wife] played it with me (that was part of the reason I bought it, so we would have a game to play together) but she's too busy [being a mom]. And so it sits, a winking white slab.

I bought a ps3 recently, and I'm MUCH happier with it. It's closer to what I really wanted anyway, a next-gen hd-capable game console that plays BDs.

I also really regret buying t-shirts off of Threadless. I had no idea that American Apparel t-shirts shrink like mad so these damn shirts are now so small only a toddler could wear them. At least I bought them on sale.

House DVDs, or really DVDs in general, since I have no time to watch them. I only got about halfway through my seven disk Buffy set, even though I'd been eying it for a year before I bought it. UGH. I just borrow them from the library now.

@JacindaProteus: Ah, yes the SCSI scam. Incredibly enough I had a salvage scsi (1st fail) 250mb zip drive (2nd fail) from one of my previous employments. I put it in a used pc that I got cheap and eventually donated the entire deal. Never got the pc to read the zip drive either...

A cheap mattress/box spring set. It sagged badly after I'd had it a couple of months, and then the one wood strut in the box spring practically snapped in half, which made the sagging worse. Worst back pain I have ever had in my life, and I suffer from chronic back pain. After I elected to toss it and buy a good one, my back pain level went back to "normal." I will NEVER buy a cheap mattress again - sleeping on the floor on a pile of sleeping bags and mattress pads is actually better on my back than that was.

The Wii's not worth it unless you like party/parlor games, Nintendo's series, or hacking it and putting whatever you want on it.

I fall under the second and third options there. D00d, I g0tz 7o h4v3 my Metroid!!1one1!!1! F-Zero, Star Fox, Zelda, Smash Bros... all things you won't be getting on a 360... at least not until Nintendo goes the way of Sega (not likely). And to top it off, after hacking it, I was able to put my SNES, Genesis, and Nintendo back in the attic. And I no longer need the Gamecube for the GBA adapter since I've got the GBA on my Wii.

It does kinda suck that I have to hang on to all those cartridges for proof of ownership, though.

Nothing's more fun than playing with your Wii after hacking at it for a few minutes.
;)

I bought it but i could have used a regular phone and i am so paranoid I am going to loose it. I pay even more per month a whopping $95 a month to keep my Jesus phone (that's after my 15% discount for being a NJ state employee.).

My mom is getting us a Wii for Christmas but I don't have very high hopes. Maybe I'll just sell it and stick with WoW when I'm bored.

I thought, "I know I hate Microsoft and that Windows sucks, but this is a lot better than my PDA and this isn't like a PC so maybe they actually did better this time."

Hint: Go with your gut on technology purchases when your a technology guru. If you feel it's gonna' suck, you're probably right. If it says Microsoft on it, you know it will.

I ended up buying a used iPhone and hacking it to work on T-Mobile. Best idea ever.

@Ben: As to the Wii:

The Wii's not worth it unless you like party/parlor games, Nintendo's series, or hacking it and putting whatever you want on it.

I fall under the second and third options there. D00d, I g0tz 7o h4v3 my Metroid!!1one1!!1! F-Zero, Star Fox, Zelda, Smash Bros... all things you won't be getting on a 360... at least not until Nintendo goes the way of Sega (not likely). And to top it off, after hacking it, I was able to put my SNES, Genesis, and Nintendo back in the attic. And I no longer need the Gamecube for the GBA adapter since I've got the GBA on my Wii.

It does kinda suck that I have to hang on to all those cartridges for proof of ownership, though.

Nothing's more fun than playing with your Wii after hacking at it for a few minutes.
;)

What a pathetic excuse for a game, with such ridiculous hype and acclaim. Man, I wish I could have that $50 back.

The biggest weakness of the PSP was the fact that memory cards were EXPENSIVE for it when it first came out. You need AT LEAST a 2GB memory card to get anything out of the system including photos and vidoes. The cost of that memory card was probably a couple hundred dollars when the system first came out. Now its like.. 20$ or even less. If your buying a PSP only for the games then your losing out. I find the large screen to be perfect for my needs though.

Chalk up another mark in the Nintendo Wii category. It'a great console, but, I haven't turned it on in four months (literally).

I bought it primarily to play Mario Kart with co-workers...when that fad ended, I tried to pick-up Animal Crossing again. Oh well, should I ever get into console gaming again...I'm sure there's a literal pile of great titles to buy.

Sorry that yours broke, however.

Wii's are still impossible to find where I live, nary is there one on the shelves. It depends what area you live in and people's buying habits in your area.

I love my Bose ipod dock. The sound is great, the remote works great, and its just cool to have. Whats wrong with it for you?

Overall its not so bad though because at least I was able to make something back on them though when most other people just let their stuff sit.

@bagumpity: Oh, sure, I need a two-week vacation. I'm a half-dwarven fortuneteller/Jewish mother. I will stand in front of the dragon with my hands on my hips and screech at him that he can't just lie around on a pile of garbage and snore his way to getting married and giving me grandchildren. (Plus two to "induce low self-esteem.")

I blame it on the fact that GamequestDirect pretty much can issue a reprint of a game at any time now, so Atlus can issue their usual limited print run and if a game is successful make an identical reprint that cannot be distinguished from the original in any way.

Nintendo is also reprinting games, look at Hotel Dusk and Clubhouse games, both got reprints after their value skyrocketed on the secondary market. Of course these reprints come in a Greatest hits packaging but those who just want to play the game won't care, and the original packaging isn't up in value like it used to be now is it?

Past games are rare, yes that is true, but overall in the future very few games will become truly rare because of the manufacturer's ability to reprint.

Buying and reselling video games purely for profit is generally a bad idea for this reason, you will most always lose some money. If you are doing this you better keep tabs on EVERY game you own because you have a very, very limited window of time to get that game to ebay before a reprint is announced and the value drops like a rock. If your buying games to play, playing them and then getting rid of them through ebay its ok then because you are using and enjoying them.

Alternatively, you can get a long ethernet cable for $6, a $38, 13-month LIVE subscription card from NewEgg, & $35 for a 20GB HDD on eBay.

The major USED to include corporate/event video (which, oddly, I've been doing professionally for about 14 years), but now they've restricted it to "Everyone-Wants-To-Be-A-Director-And-Make-Movies", which is most definitely NOT what I want to do.

@Gmork: We're allowed to take up to nine credits/three classes a semester with our employee tuition grant (though I really can't handle more than two classes on top of work). Wife gets the same benefit too, as well as kids (none for me though).

The crappy thing with the amount we pay (and don't get me wrong, it's better than paying $1000 or whatever per credit) is that the bulk of it is a technology fee and an "energy fee" (since the administration here didn't foresee energy costs going up apparently and went millions over budget...so they nail the students for it). Technology that I only use to the extent of the campus email system (and technically, I don't even use that as a student, I use it as STAFF). I don't use the labs either. And "energy"? Well, I suppose if I'm in a classroom, yes. But that "energy fee" is meant to lessen the impact of the dorms...and I obviously don't live on campus. So that's rather ridiculous.

Blargh. I'm just venting. Sorry, everyone.

Just gotta change my major and feel like I'm doing something worthwhile to get that important piece of paper that everyone seems to need in the job market.

But that doesn't mean I can't mix drinks for european tourists. And they're welcome to try and collect on my student loans in Varadero!

one thing i did learn, is to read everything before a download. as that was a stupid mistake on my part.

and yes, after it was released, I downloaded street fighter HD. only this time I MADE sure that it was what it was before I downloaded it...

I've used it four times in the last year. Turns out our local water and the shape of the tub means the ph is always off. I lost electricity late last winter, so I drained it. I didn't drain it thoroughly, so the pipes burst. It sits out there looking cheap.

I also regret the Jeep Liberty. It didn't hold anything, got 16mpg, and had too many issues with tires, suspension, brakes, and electrical.

We play the Xbox 360 and PS3 all the time. The Wii? Never.

@Murph1908: I've owned one for almost 10 years now, and am quite able to drive it in snow. I drove to a freinds house in six inches of snow withut a problem. It did take 1.5 hours to drive 10 miles but I did get there with no problems at all. Just make sure that if you have winter where you live that you get winter tires!

I guess people are used to fwd cars these days. I mytself, will never buy one again.

2ct diamond engagement ring that she wore for three months. I later found out that she told everyone it was from the guy she was cheating on me with. There's more to the story, but I don't want to overshare.

Probably this pair of jeans from a Kenneth Cole mall store. Brought them home, realized they're dumb jeans, misplaced the receipt, got denied on the return, & verbally took it out on the effeminate employee. Now I use these whiskered, trendy Kenneth Cole jeans for staining furniture or other dirty work. But I called that employee & apologized for my behavior, so I guess the purchase was worth its weight in humility.

Also...a time-share with my wife. Oi. Never used it in 4 years.

@speedwell: One of my best friends is a half-elf ranger, and he wears a very similar cloak. I'm rather short and stout, and I have furry feet, so I just wear leather armor and a half-cloak over one shoulder.

We should totally go questing together.

@ganzhimself:
Also, a CRT HDTV. A 30" TV that weighed over 110 lbs and the picture quality was not very good. Paid too much for it and I finally got rid of it 3 years later.

One of our acquaintances bought one a few years later. The conversation went like this:

Friend: Is that your only car? You are not going to be able to drive it in the snow.

Acquaintance: Yeah, my only car. I'll have to drive it it the snow.

Friend: Well, you won't be ABLE to drive it in the snow.

Acquaintance: I'll have to!

Friend: You WON'T be ABLE TO.

Three months later, he was calling people to come help him push it out of a ditch.

@edicius: I got my bachelor's in film. After 3 years of bs jobs and thinking I was a complete failure I came to the realization the degree is worthless. Run away!

I wish I could sell mine too. I spent a load of money getting an English degree and more trying to get a teaching certificate, which I was very enthusiastic about until I discovered that it wasn't for me, and I'd need a Ph.D to teach at university level anyway. So what am I doing right now?

Answering someone's phone.

@QuantumRiff: One of the financial planners in the firm I work for has gone through three Russian brides and they all went back to Russia, his cash and all the shit he's bought them in tow. And he's planning on going back to Russia again after New Year's to try again.

He's such a moron. What makes it worse is that he makes his living managing clients' money.

People whine because its a Ford, but then are too ignorant to realize its really just a Mazda with a Ford logo slapped on it. This includes the Mazda dealership that refused to give it its 120k mi tuneup.

My last desktop computer I built... Right around the time of the "Dual Core" craze, bought a complete setup AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ Socket 939(I think?), plus motherboard, HDD, 2GB ram and an expensive-ish ATI Radeon videocard. About $1200 total. All on credit, while going to college and working less than 20 hours a week. About three months later the same processor was available for half the price, and the Intel Core Duos were destroying the X2s in performance. I'm still kicking myself over that, and I've vowed that I'm just buying budget laptops for now on, because they're all that I really need.

The PT Cruiser in 2001. Everybody wanted one (including me) and they were hard to get. The most uncomfortable car I've ever driven. Kept for just a year and a half. Sold it and went back to driving my 1990 New Yorker. It was a sweet ride but by 2004 it was breaking faster than I could fix it.

@InfiniTrent: I agree. Best $50 DVD player I ever bought. The 5 free movies did not hurt either. Saves wear and tear on the xbox and I moved my dedicated DVD player to the smaller TV. I bought mine the day they declared Blu the 'winner'.

Apparently having a good charger is just as important as having a good battery.

[www.amazon.com]

I'm curious, did you hook up the 360 with HDMI, component, or composite? I've had an Aquos for a few years & the ghosting from both a PS2 (composite) & a DVD player (component) was nearly unbearable. Faces would melt during monologue scenes, action scenes devolved into wide, grey brushstrokes, & most PS2 games looked like deer shit. But now I've got a 360 w/HDMI, & it totally rules. No ghosting, HD for games, & near-HD quality for DVD's.

How about "I will listen to others but make the best decision for me personally." - does that work better?

Automatic toilet paper dispenser, no wait, that might be the best thing I bought.

Mine right now would be a table we bought from Ashley Furniture. We were in the process of buying our house and we saw this GREAT DEAL in Ashley. So I bought the table, and it sat in storage until the house deal was done.

I bring it into the new house, I assemble it... and realize it's much too big for our eat-in kitchen.

I buy a lot of small, stupid crap that I wonder why I bought it six months later, but that's the first 100+ dollar item I bought that I wondered, "WTF?"

@shufflemoomin:

I like my Wii. I've had it since Day 1 and haven't regretted it once. Sure, there are strings of days - even weeks - where I never touch it. But I still have fun when I do decide to play. WiiFit is great as long as you know what to expect before you buy.

I regret going to law school. Private law school in fact. Worst $120k i ever spent.

The laptop I bought my wife so she could write her book she wants to write. That was 5 years ago and there are maybe 10 pages written. But then again, my desktop took a dump on me, so at least the laptop is getting used now. Even so, I paid about 1k for what I could get for maybe $500-$600 now.

@cmkennedy: I am in the boat with everyone else with regretting buying a house in 2006 in a highly inflated market (Wash DC area).

I would love to sell it to get out from under the mortgage we are in, but who can afford to do that in this economy? My 401k accounts have lost 60% of its value in the last year. At this point its wiped out all my employer matching funds and a good chunk of the money I put in!

Face it folks, we're screwed no matter what happens!

@mzs: Yeah, baby - any software that took advantage of EMS was hot on that box. It was the two grand it cost me that I still regret.

The Windstar had a "check engine" light when I bought it, and the dealer promised to fix it. They took it into their shop, did something that managed to get the light to go off, and gave it back to me. Two weeks later, the light came on again. Then, soon, it wouldn't stay running at idle. One mechanic I took it to said that the problem was, one piston wasn't even firing.

Well, there's a much longer story to the whole thing, but the bottom line was that it was a stupid purchase made on the spur of the moment, which I later regretted and I was lucky to unload the damn thing a year later for not much of a loss.

I somewhat regret paying $90,000 for my wife's graduate education. She's never worked more than part time since and is currently only working about 4 hours a week. That was more than 10 years ago, though, so pretty much water under the bridge. Also, it's an in-demand, non-outsourcable area, so if I get laid off, she should be able to find a good paying job.

I'm generally good about buying things I know I'm going to use and enjoy, so I have few regrets. Mostly kitchen gadgets - juicer, fryer, dehydrator, tortilla press (what the hell was I thinking?). The rice cooker is great, though.

@temporaryscars:
Amazon.com! got a Samsung LN52A650 LCD for almost $1000 less than Best Buy and with no tax and free shipping I could not have made a better purchase EVER! My Wii on the other hand...

All that crack and meth.

/joke

DVDs I didn't buy used. I'm no good at renting, and i love to be able to rewatch, but I haven't paid more than $7.50 for any recent release since I wised up 2 years ago.

3 year sports car lease two months before the US financial collapse.

I'm glad my wife likes the Wii because I don't. I love the PS3. Such a multi-functional device:

Games
Media Extender
Media Streamer
Blu-Ray Player

Best $350 I ever spent. Now my 32" Toshiba? That was a waste and my fault. I didn't look to see if it included a tuner because I got it on sale for $300 less than the normal price but I had to spend 150$ on a Samsung tuner to get OTA HDTV.

DOH!

What else... I regret buying my ticket to move abroad. Sort of. Ever since I moved, I haven't been able to get a decent job in my field due to one circumstance or another (mostly visa and cultural bias issues).

Oh, my biggest "purchase regret" was having contacted a lawyer about a patent for a product that never launched. It cost me $25K+. The process of trying to get my product to market (and failing) completely killed my entrepreneurial spirit. I wish I never tried my hand at inventing. (No, it wasn't a scam - I went to an actual patent lawyer, but couldn't find the proper channels or people to look at my product.)

The thing I regret buying is my couch. It's pretty and gets compliments, but not very comfortable. And that was my own meanness biting me in the ass. My sister used to live with me (she's kind of a big girl). She and her girlfriend (also a big girl- I mean over 6' tall and not skinny) would lay on my old couch together. The combined weight broke my last couch. So, when I went to buy my new couch, I got something that my petite self could lay on, but without much extra room so my sister and her lady wouldn't want to cuddle on the couch together. Then my sister moved out a couple of months later.

Not so much the car itself, because I love her and she has never let me down, but the loan i used to buy it was a disaster. I was young and had never financed a car and fell victim to every car dealer trick in the book. Now i am wiser and with it paid off i will never finance a car again or buy a new one. I paid cash for my wife's used Honda and never looked back.

@The BCS Dartboard Mount Intern: Ah-ha. The $100 rug I bought just a couple months ago, which I love, but recently realized that if I'm gonna try to pack all my stuff into my car and move across the country, is not coming with me. That was a poor decision.

The Wii gets used constantly in my house. I have two kids under 10. I used to be a fairly serious gamer but in my dotage (42) and with work and family obligations, I find that I rarely have more than an hour to sit down and play. The Wii is great for kids, casual gamers and non-gaming visitors.

Popular titles in our house include Brawl, Guitar Hero III, Wii Play (still), and Super Mario Galaxy. Watching a 4 1/2 year loves "the Guitar Game" and can score over 90% on a variety of songs at Medium difficulty. It's amazing to watch.

I like the workout Wii Boxing can give you, but it's boring. Punch Out looks like fun.

i finally gave up. traded my cube in for an xbox, upgraded a couple years ago & haven't looked back. my 360 is the hardest working electronic device in my house (esp. with the new XBE dashboard).

@suburbancowboy: I bit it on the Sega CD - what a piece of trash. I think I had blocked it from my memory before you mentioned it.

What a hunk of junk.

Just about anything I've gotten from Think Geek. I don't know why I keep insisting on trusting them when they have some whiz-bang new item that's awesome. They almost never work out quite as well as they seem they would.

The latest was a mini-fridge that looked better than any other mini-fridge I've ever seen. It can't hit the range the thermostat can be set to, the most un-insulated mini-fridge I've ever stood around and gotten a chill from, not to mention loud.

Think Geek is like an abusive lover.

Has to be the 12 pairs of Romanian underwear I got for $2.40 on Fatwallet. The buttons fell of those things right away, they smelled like transmission fluid and they gave me boils.

But still, 12 prs./$2.40...

:(

Park Place. Nobody lands on the damn thing.

/joke

I don't know, I've bought plenty of ill-advised budding-hobby-related equipment and gadgetry (Ibanez acoustic guitar, Canon Powershot IS3, high-quality running shoes), but I wouldn't call those regrets, as they're good equipment, and it's just my lazy ass that renders them useless.

Guess my only active regret is my Blackjack II, which is a fine phone, but it's overpowered for what I need at the moment, and I'm somewhat locked into a data plan with it.

Umm... I bought the collectors edition, so it comes with special titles, faces, items and fun-tastic things like a hardcover art book and comic.

@woot: Switch to bromine for your pool chemistry. It won't mess up your steel, you use less of it, and it's safer (well, less omg toxic) than clorine.

I don't know if they still do, but Mazda offered a torsen differential as an option. If you live in a snowy place you might want to get that option.

That said, I kinda regret owning a Miata. Driving many thousands of miles at 70+ with the top down without ear protection really messed up my hearing.

I like a little bowling or Mario Kart or pinball every now and then, but I'd guess I spent more time playing Oblivion than all the games I have for the Wii combined.

I don't know, sometimes I regret purchasing an original iPhone more. EDGE = fail.

@donovanr: Nah. When I want to play games, I play games. Which is a lot. When I want excercise (which is also a lot), I'll belt out 100 pushups/100 situps or run around the park. I don't need to be enticed into it with cutesy b.s., I just do it. Say, that would make a good ad slogan...

Samba De Amigo, Soul Caliberm, House of the Dead, Crazy Taxi. There may not have been many games, but there were a high percentage of great games. That is how Sega always rolled. Look at the Sega Master System. It got killed by NES, but NES had crappy graphics and thousands of games of which only a handful were any good. SMS had a small selection of games, but most of them were awesome.

My most regretted purchase. Turbo-Grafx 16 (with Sega-CD a close second). Sega Menacer also a regret.
TG-16 and Sega CD cost a small fortune when they first came out and I pretty much never played either system.

I haven't bought a game for my Wii since March, close to the time you bought your Wii and first game(s). There just aren't games worth buying for the system anymore, and Brawl was sort of a letdown. I was stoked for Animal Crossing: City Folk, but when I learned it was the same game the previous two Animal Crossings were, only with a slight city aspect, I opted against it. Besides, the town in my DS version is likely overrun with weeds now as I haven't checked it in years.

The Wii is an okay system, but I think it's my biggest let down of this generation. So much promise, and then Nintendo and other developers just don't deliver. The system is filled with so much shovelware that appeals to the new gamers the system brings in, but then gives the bird to gamers like me who have supported Nintendo all these years and were ready to help them regain the top spot.

Should you only go with one system this generation, it would have to be Xbox 360. I hated Microsoft and the Xbox last generation, as I feel they more or less bought their victory over Nintendo, coupled with the fact that all their good games were cross platform, I just thought they were an upstart to the industry. Then the 360 came out, gobbled up all the good exclusives and didn't let go, added an awesome on-line service, and the damn achievement points were ADDICTING to hard core gamers like myself. Hands down, it is the best system of this generation of consoles, and could likely be one of the best systems ever.

Engagement ring for a woman practically begging me to marry her. Now the joke with my current girlfriend (whom I'll most likely end up marrying for real this time) is "No pressure."

Other than that, I occasionally suffer buyer's remorse from selling my 2006 GTI and buying a 2008 R32 (went from no payments to...well, payments), but every time I get in and drive it all melts away and I can't see why I'd want the GTI instead.

I still enjoy my Wii. I'm more of a casual gamer so it takes me quite a while to beat a game. I played through Super Mario Galaxy and Zack and Wiki and go back to Mario Kart every now and then. Currently, I'm working on Zelda. I also still have my gamecube games of which I never beat any of them, so I want to go back and play through them too.

@downwithmonstercable: Brand new Samsung LN52A650 for almost $1000 less than Best Buy was asking plus no tax and free shipping! 5 days after ordering it I could not have made a better purchase EVER! my Wii on the other hand...

@Unit3000-21: Exactly.

Home prices are settling back down to a fair market value. There's a reason they call it a "bubble," followed by a "burst" or "market correction."

I just bought my house four months ago and will probably end up upside-down shortly, but with the high turnover rate of houses in my area and considerable job security (Hampton Roads, Va...HUGE military presence) I probably won't be too badly off.

everything with a 2 year contract. my cellphone, my direct tv, my old dsl (contract ran out) anything locking me into something that will be out of date in 6 months is bad.

@kimsama: 4 games?! I've got at least 30! I got my DC after Sega pulled the plug and every was CHEAP! I think I maybe spent $300 on all of the DC gear that I own. In fact I got 2 consoles...just in case...

My only regret about Dreamcast is that 7 years later, I've got games that I haven't even unwrapped!

Nintendo sucks because they typical make games for the younger kids. Probably wont ever buy nintendo again.

@Real Cheese Flavor: Ebay.

Do you have lots of parties? Or even entertain groups of friends frequently? Have kids? Optionally, a short attention span like mine? And most importantly, are you a casual gamer?

Read up on the games available, go find a buddy with a Wii and playtest the heck out of it.

I think the Wii is fantastic, but I rarely play it by myself. All the fun really is in multiplayer, with the exception of some first party games.

A sustain pedal for my keyboard a few weeks ago. Walking through a store and I see one and I usually dont impulse buy like this, but I was like "hm, I've been needing one of these." I've used it once.

My Mandolin. I guess I don't regret it that much but I NEVER play it.

Guitar Hero 2... bought it when it was all the fad.

Hmmmm... maybe back in college when I bought a pretty sweet percussion set, but I used it a lot, just def. didn't have the money for it.

My shitty $300 surround-sound-in-a-box that I replaced 16 months later with a real system and now it's, still, sitting in a box.

I bought a fishing pole this summer, used it exactly once.

$1800 Sony Viao. O

@ninjatoddler: Oh yeah, I have a lot of clothes like this...worst - and I keep it around as a reminder - this burgundy shirt with a grey and blue mini-argyle pattern that I got from Eddie Bauer. Not a bank-breaker, but I never wore it once.

1. Bluetooth headphones for my BlackBerry: They had such crap battery life - and couldn't be played while charging, WTF - that I didn't really care when they quit less than a year after purchase. Gimme my wires.

2. Occasionally I forget which books I already have, or lose track of small objects. When I run into the original several months later, I kick myself. (Of course, spare chargers, headphones, etc. bought pre-emptively, so that I can have one for home and one for work/travel are treasured belongings. Incompetence tax? Yes. Incompetence hacking? Yes indeed, and frees me up to work on some other things that need improving instead of kicking myself for not being able to work on everything at once.)

3. Everything that ever looked delicious in the vending machines.

4. Big honkin' carriers for my cats. The ex (a dog person) insisted they would want the extra room. Couple years later, I find out cats prefer the secure feeling of one that's just big enough for standing and turning around. And being a tiny person, I'd prefer to move smaller carriers too.

5. That Compaq laptop from Best Buy. Sure it was awesome...when it worked. Or maybe I should say, the Best Buy warranty. Next time, Micro Center.

6. World of Warcraft. I never felt like I could experience the game enough without joining a raiding guild full of tools. At least when I played FFXI, I endured the suck with friends. (And then I left City of Heroes to go back to WoW with my dog-loving ex! Who by all rights also ought to be on the list since he was a freeloader too. Sigh.)

I'm a rantypants today. >.> I should probably shut up.

@RulesLawyer: Spore! Yes, good call.

you could at least given them to a bum or something... what a waste...

I have all three consoles, and to a degree all three have been disappointing. I would have to say that the Wii gets turned on the least, my 360 has been sent in for repairs twice (but remains my preferred console).

And the PS3? If the games available on the 360 (I rent games) I get it on the 360...I like the controller better. I like that the PS3 has blu-ray, but not being able to use a regular universal remote makes me want to scream.

@Gilbert: I'm with you on the PS3. My husband, son and I play it quite often.
And just so I don't get yelled at, the worst purchase was everything I put in to remodeling my old house. In Michigan. When we moved to Memphis for work, we were lucky to be able to sell it in 3 months (because it was beautiful after all the work we'd done) at a huge loss. Grr...

Imagine my dismay that my mad l33t Rock Band skillz didn't translate directly into actually playing guitar! I took lessons for awhile and made some progress, but with none of my friends playing any instruments, the bloom came off the rose after a few months.

Still, I'll hang on to it. It looks really pretty on my wall and its memory has kept me from buying a drum kit.

I regret the purchase of my first condo, at the age of 25, in my hometown. It was a cute place in an historic neighborhood, and I didn't pay a whole lot for it. However, I didn't like the fact that it got no direct sunlight, and I got the itch to move to a bigger city a year later and sold it. I sold it for about $2,000 more than I paid for it but that didn't make up for the closing costs and the appliances I bought and sold with it. I probably lost about $8,000 on it.

Also the German Military leather coat I bought off ebay. There was a repro coat for $300, but I decided I didn't want to spend that much. So I bought a vintage one of ebay from germany. Coat $200, shipping $50, dry-cleaning in a desperate attempt to get the musty smell out $56. And I'm left with a still-musty smelling coat that doesn't look all that great and I don't like wearing.

Right now I'm teetering on the edge of buying a Netbook, and can't decide if it'll be a big boon or a really pointless purchase.

@kimsama: I'll stick up for the PS3, I love mine and use it for all kinds of crap - needless to say, FPS titles are strictly for the PC in my house but that would be the case no matter what console I owned.

Most regretted purchase was probably the ol' KitchenAid mixer - we do a lot of cooking, but not really of a scale or type that makes the appliance useful. So it's a boat anchor. I would have said the bread machine too, but that was a gift.

An Us 3 CD I bought when I was 15. How was I supposed to know that Cantaloupe was the only good song? Wait, I used to think Cantaloupe was a good song.

The price had dropped to $200 within 30 days of buying it but of course Amazon discontinued their price guarantee policy; would have returned it if I had saved the box.

@EarlNowak: well after the freak snow storm we got today in Baton Rouge, you should be quite ecstatic to get some use out of it!

I don't regret our purchase of the Wii at all. We don't use it *a ton* because we are busy with projects around the house and work or what not, but it's fun to have when we do have some time to blow off steam. Also, with the classic downloadable games we were able to box up/donate all our old consoles because almost all games were covered and available on the Wii.

Never bought a Wii. I knew from the moment I saw it, I'd never play it... I do play my Xbox 360 daily (a little before bed), I think that's the frivolous purchase I least regret.

I also have an HD-DVD player, and it's wonderful. I don't care if it's a "dead format". There are still a LOT of movies out for it (cheap!) and the thing is region free, so I can get the foreign releases of a lot of the movies that weren't released here on that format.

The prices they are at now are what they SHOULD be worth. They should have never gotten to the prices they were at 2 years ago.

When I got my first job at age 16 (a year ago) I got my first pay check ever. $80 for slaving at Dunkin Donuts for 14 hours, serving bitch ass women and old men.

I immedietly ran to EB Games and bought a PS2. Unfortunetly I didnt have enough money for a game or a memory card. I didnt get to play it for 2 more weeks, and I ended up never playing it.

Also a couple weeks later I saved up 3 paychecks and bought a Jak and Daxter PSP bundle. It sucked, I kept the PSP for 2 months then sold it to a kid at school for $80

The Lowlights:

1. A purebred Shi Tzu puppy. $1500 + at least a thousand more in dog training, dog sitting, grooming and veterinary bills...and after all that, I wound up moving out of the country and had to give it away! Not only did I feel like a terrible pet owner, I felt like a terrible steward of my resources. Oy vey.

2. A half-completed massage therapy course. $1600. Yeah. I thought I wanted to be me a masseuse. Then came the volunteer subject with the carpeted hairy back. Dreams = obliterated. Course = abandoned.

3. Every fake tanning session I ever bought, acrylic nail set I ever got, and yoga class I ever took. Dumb, dumb, dumb. And in retrospect, overpriced.

4. My entire first year of college. $7500. I wasn't emotionally ready for college, but I let my parents talk me into enrolling anyway. And then I was miserable. Had I taken a gap year to work, travel or volunteer, I reckon my late teens would've been a hell of a lot more endurable.

Sigh. There are so many more...but, I'm not a total idiot because I somehow managed to make it to age 24 with zero debt and a little 'rainy day' fund to boot. Hooray for financial redemption. :)

@bovinekid: I know this is meant to be a place to laugh at ourselves and be sarcastic, but please--talk to somebody, somebody who can help.

The mental health center at my law school did save my life.

I'm all for people with different gaming habits liking other consoles, though. Most of my friends are 360ists all the way (and have more time to game...I'm jealous :P)

My worst purchase ever was a Dreamcast. I mean, I love having it, but DAMN that thing had like 4 games made for it, ever.

I am in the same boat, except mine is termites and mold. I found out two weeks after I bought it - when my foot went through the floor. The home inspector missed all of it :/ - The termite inspector did to. Five years later and I am still trying to put it back together.

it's collecting dust.

I'm usually good about these things otherwise. I can't think of any other regrets....except those bad drugs I took in the 90's. The good ones I have no regrets over.

@rockasocky: Totally with you on law school. It was a lovely experience in retrospect (especially once I lost that eye twitch) but I graduated during the last recession of this size (90-91) and um, yeah, not a lawyer now.

It helps to keep you to be considered overqualified from many a position that would have been nice to pay the bills.

But I ran to the industry that is safe for the overeducated, the book industry.

I really wish you could sell your degree though.

But it was SHINY....

Sold it on Craigslist.

I do miss the qwerty keyboard, though.

#2 apple newton. $1200, barely touched it, now it's trash

My HD DVD player just weeks before everyone went Blueray.

I have several purchases I regret...

First, our house. We bought it in 2002 when housing prices were still high. We live in Michigan. Needless to say, the bottom has dropped out of the housing market and we are probably $20K upside-down on our house.

Second, my law school education. Yes, I am currently earning a living as an attorney, but the legal market is really difficult right now. If I were to lose my job, and I may soon, it would be extremely difficult to find a new one. Not to mention that I don't earn nearly as much money as I thought I would be making because I work for a very small firm. Thanks to interest, I owe more on my student loans now than I did when I graduated.

Third, our living room furniture from Pottery Barn. We purchased this furniture from an outlet store almost 3 years ago...it is beat to hell. Since it was expensive, I figured that meant it was high quality furniture...HAH! Wrong!! The back pillows are all misshapen, the zipper broke on the chaise cover so we can't remove it to wash it, and (this is my fault I admit) we bought it in a beigey-taupey-golden type color and we have THREE black dogs. Way to go!

Fourth, my son's acoustic guitar. He kept asking for one and asking for one, so we bought him one for his birthday a couple of years ago...he never plays it.

I am hoping that with age comes wisdom...we will see!

Textbooks for just about every college or grad school course I've taken. Usually I ended up either not using them at all or just using them the first couple weeks when I was still "motivated". And yet every semester I still bought them.

1. I bought a pair of 12" subs and an amp for my 4-banger Saturn for $800. Yes. You can punch me now. I actually turned on the subs probably less than two dozen times before selling everything for less than $400. I should have known it was a bad idea when my stepfather told me he would take a hammer to the setup if he ever heard it on his driveway...

2. This is the worst one of all. I bought an Alienware laptop for about $2400-fucking-bucks when I was still in high school. Within a couple of years it was fairly underpowered. The fan was loud as hell, it ran hot, it couldn't finish a 90 minute DVD on battery power, the CD drive rattled, and the screen is cracked at the hinges for no discernible reason. It can't even power on anymore. DON'T BUY ALIENWARE! Dell's XPS systems are way better.

3. This one is recent. I bought an Xbox 360 Arcade and an LCD TV for about $600 together. The 360 was a good deal, because I got a free, refurbished, extra controller and 20GB hard drive for the standard $200. The TV, though, is bottom-of-the-line. The speakers are terrible (5 watts each), and I don't even have digital programming, let alone anything HD. Hell, I don't even have a single 360 game, just original Xbox games (of which only half will play on the 360... damn you, Microsuck!).

4. My apartment which costs half my monthly salary. I felt the need to get out of my house... Turns out I should have stayed for at least a few more months. This place is terrible. Loudmouth bastards constantly shouting and loafing in the halls. Most of them are shady or have the look of a gangbanger. The office staff is completely apathetic. Police constantly roam the area. And this is a decent part of town, right across the street from a nice community college with their own dedicated police force! I was lucky enough to keep my rent the same from last year to this year; at the current rate this place is no where worth it.

Time to start on that side job...

It was a lot more than $400 though. Where did you find one that (relatively speaking) cheap?

@bobbycreekwater: Mine would be the PS3 as well. It could be a hell of a machine, but it was poorly executed, and rarely ever gets turned on...

I regret stuff all the time, but one sticks out, and no one's said it yet. I regret the reindeer fur pelt I bought on a trip to Alaska this fall. I even felt pretty confident because I didn't get it right away, I walked away the first time. I ended up driving past the shop twice during the trip, and since I was still thinking about it on the second pass, I took that as a sign that I really wanted it and would enjoy my purchase.

The fact that the lady couldn't really tell me anything about it or where it came from should have been a tip-off. My roommate freaked a little when she saw it, and I began to notice how it wasn't quite as soft and luxurious as I thought it was. And I didn't have a great place to put it (especially since I was limited to my bedroom so as not to discomfit my roommate). Also, it was developing an increasingly distinct odor. Doing some research (which I would have loved to do beforehand if I wasn't on the road), I learned that hides can be either properly cured or simply dried, and it seemed increasingly likely that this was from the latter category. The last straw was discovering much later a stamp identifying its origin in Finland.

I also shouldn't have mentioned the whole distressing story at work, because one of my coworkers now frequently greets me with a jovial "How's the pelt?"

Unwanted and smelly, thank you!

I have a tie for worst purchase recently:

1. My Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. I actually picked it up to do some wireless hacking work, but kind of got bored of that. Then when I re-imaged it to use as a regular old internet tablet, I discovered it was slooowwwwww as hell. Terrible buy.

2. $99 Toshiba HD-DVD player. Not only did the medium die, but the player was DOA out of the box anyway. I had arranged to get some warranty service done on it, but never got around to actually shipping it. So it sits in my basement, collecting dust and I have an unopened HD-DVD of Big Lebowski sitting on my self. :D

In my defense, I had to quickly replace a screened in enclosure after a hurricane demolished it, and the HOA wouldn't allow anything that was in pre-built sections because that wasn't "architectural" enough.

However, it's made of steel. Yes, steel. Expensively fashioned and sitting right next to a chlorine vapor-generating pool and spa. I wish someone had pointed out why this was a mistake. I'm literally watching it disintegrate. Dumb, dumb, dumb, but lesson learned the hard way :-)

...and I love my Wii. After a year, I still play it regularly.

I had a 2001 Mustang GT that I loved. I wanted to supercharge it. I ended up saving the $5000 necessary to do it. It was another $1000 to have it installed, and another $200 to get it tuned. About a year later I sold the car for $12,000 with only 50k on it. I probably could have sold it for at least $15k, but it was to a friend that I had stupidly said "Oh yeah well if you were to buy it I would give it to you for $12k", not knowing that he would actually be interested in the least bit.

My dad asked me about 4 years back if I wanted a guitar and I told him yeah. I didn't know how to play but wanted to learn.
He went out and bought me a beautiful acoustic guitar with mother of peal inlays. It was a prototype guitar directly from the company so it was one-of-a-kind. I used it maybe a total of 10 times trying to teach myself and haven't touched it in about 3.5 years. I didn't pay for it, but I feel bad because he did.

I've bought numerous games in the past that were a waste.

My girlfriend and I found an apartment that we loved about 2 months before we graduated from college. We didn't want to lose it (it was an amazing deal) so we signed the lease even though we wouldn't be living in it for a couple of months. I had lost my job at the time, so my parents loaned us the $3200 for the time being, which I still owe them 9 months later... which leads me into my BIGGEST regret of them all:

Credit card debt. My girlfriend had some financial troubles so I did some balance transfers onto my cards to get rid of her 29% interest rates. I also had a significant amount of debt. We are currently about $15k in credit card debt together (low interest, though... most is at 0% or 9%, the rest at 13%) My regret isn't doing the balance transfers into my name (although it has affected my credit) but rather the fact that we even have the debt in the first place. Most of it comes from when we were studying abroad in England. The exchange rate at the time was $2/pound and we ran out of money very quickly. We pay off $800/month towards our debt and it still feels like we are getting nowhere.

I bought my 360 like a month before they started lowering the prices (and less than a week before the news of the impending price-lowering was all over the internet). I have always been very pissed about that.

My boyfriend bought me a guitar and it was the greatest gift I have ever gotten (it was not super expensive, but it was easily the most thoughtful thing anyone has ever gotten for me) but I am horrible at it and never play it because I have found it very difficult for me to learn to play, and I feel massively guilty. This was a cathartic way to confess my guilt about the guitar because it's buried on the 7th page of comments and very few people, if anyone, will ever read about what a terrible person I am!

The storage unit I rented. It's way too easy to rent one, and way too hard to get rid of the stuff so you don't need the unit anymore.

Loved the demo, dropped $60 on the game, played through campaign once, sold it.

Guitar Hero III also falls under this category. Why? I love Rock Band and thought I'd love Guitar Hero III, also.

Pair of dark blue Berkline recliners about six years ago. SWMBO and I always wanted recliners and they felt really comfortable in the store. Got them home and after a few weeks got tired of all the effort to get in and out of them. One of them broke after two years and is in a pile in the basement. The other is used as a seating place for our daughter's dolls.

@gc3160 - that homo that u know: I suppose that would be funnier if I was a guy, right?

Forgive me further for not agreeing with you.

And if I were to answer the post, though I thought long and hard about it and really came to no significant conclusions, the answer would be the tee shirts I bought last month. They were on sale and I was overzealous. I do not need 85 different colors.

That said, I'm sorry you don't like your PS3. Perhaps you should do more research before delving into purchases of note, that you might avoid regret another day.

In the meantime, I'll get back to Wall-E.

Real estate investment property bought in 2005 in an up and coming neighborhood. Three years later the neighborhood is much worse (think prostitutes, drug dealers and murders) and we have a foreclosed property on either side of our property.

We put down 20% but we have no equity as the propery value has gone down. We have a renter in the property but rent is regularly late and we are losing money each month. The only up side is the tax deduction.

I'm now a die-hard scooter fan for the past 5 years. The difference (for me) is that I did my research and didn't buy a piece of Chinese crap. The local shop was adamant about buying quality, even though it would cost a little more. My Kymco scooter has taken me back and forth to work for 4 years. from Cleveland to Connecticut twice, and around Lake Erie 3x.

When purchasing scooters, buy a name brand (Vespa, Piaggio, Kymco, Honda) who have been around a long time and will continue to make replacement parts. The Chinese knock offs carry no warranty and often stop making parts for any given scooter after 1 year.

Im going with the Epiphone acoustic-electric bass. I had it at my best friends house when it flooded in 2007. I bought it because I was playing a lot of acoustic shows at the time but, at every place I played, the bass was too damn big for the area we were givien to setup in. All in all it cost $550 with the nice hard shell case.

In second would be the applause by ovation shallow body acousitc-electric I got at a flea market. It's a really nice guitar but after I got it out of the sun and humidity, the bridge pulled away from the body. The kicker is I paid $250 for it used, and I could buy the same thing new on amazon for the same price.

@intellivised: Im with you, I have two Zoom floor pedals(one for the bass and one for the guitar) and I prefer the sound of my bass(guitar) though my 67 bassman siverface. But the bassman needs new tubes so im using a berhinger 90 watt wedge on stage now untill I get can get the tubes.

@The_IT_Crone: Naw, it couldn't be that. *cough*

@The_IT_Crone: Oh, and the "Limited" gunmetal gray PS3 that Amazon can't get rid of.

Will I ever learn? :X

I looked at the ad on craigslist for the Wii offered here and others, I must say that I am amazed at the number of people expecting to get full retail (or sometimes more) for something that is in good supply now.

I have seen wii's (??) on sale at every major retailer , well in stock for months and everyone and their brother is still treating them as if they were in short supply.

must be nice to be popular! Too bad so many people "bore out".

Have you been in a coma the last two years? Right now, the chances of selling a house for what it should be worth is about the same as getting struck by lightning.

The car was (is?) my favorite vehicle, and I became rather determined to get one for myself. This is despite the fact that I had a perfectly good, fully loaded 2007 Corolla S with less than 10k miles on it. I still owed another $7k on the Corolla, but was paid through August of 2009, thanks to my giant payments.

Anyway, I went to test drive the IS 350 one day, not intending at all to actually buy one. And ended up buying one. I was looking at $389/month for SEVEN years.

They gave me $13k for the Corolla trade-in and I put an additional $3500 cash down on the Lexus. I drive it for two weeks then took it back. I realized how financially stupid I was being and was desperate to get out from under the Lexus. The only thing they had on the lot I could afford was a granny's old '95 Buick Century. One owner, wonderful condition, less than 50k miles. I had to spend another $3200 to buy that. Each drive is a harsh reminder of my stupidity.

It was an expensive lesson and the dumbest thing I've ever done. However, now I have two paid off car loans on a my credit score, which was already in the mid 700s before this fiasco. Not bad for a 25 year old, I guess.

I bought a flashy red silk shirt that was on sale when I was in high school and I kept it for a few years before getting rid of it. I thought it would look cool, but it was totally not me and I would never actually wear anything like it.

But I was out $3000 to get this place, so damn if I'm leaving.

90% of them have never seen a stage or made a cameo on recording. Every band I end up in I end up using the same rig, the same beat to hell guitar and I'm swimming in pedals I just don't need.

I'm thinking about doing a massive sell off.

Movies that I haven't seen but just heard about and pick up based on that tend to give me the most grief. They almost invariably suck and I regret shelling out the bucks for them. At least with rentals I'm not stuck with a bad product afterward.

The original DVD releases of the James Bond series. I didn't have as much $$ at the time and stupidly tried to piecemeal together the sets. In under a year they were all re-released for a fraction of what the originals cost me, and never mention the remastered ones that just came out a little while ago.

Then there's the various TV series. I picked up the full 10 season run of Stargate SG-1... to learn a few weeks later about the complete series box set. That one I kick myself the most over. Similar situation with Buffy. I have about 10 series that I WISH I could exchange for the complete series sets.

Half Life 2 Collector's Edition (because I wanted a DVD to install it) and Episode 1. I snagged them both at decent price literally a month before the xmas bundle of them both came out. And let's not talk about the Orange Box. I was pissed when that came out.

A Radeon 9550 video card. Didn't research enough. Ended up replacing it a few months in.

A goodly number of university course text books. Some barely even got cracked open.

On the gamer note, i love my PS3, and my neighbor played his Wii about twice..

@toadthetoad: I have issues with OS X as well... my current sorta regret is my White 2.4 Ghz Macbook. I Vista more than OS X on it currently... lol.

@h0mi: @pixiegirl1: I kinda regret getting my White Macbook and wish I had gotten a Dell XPS instead... I mostly use Vista these days and have a few issues with Safari, especially on certain sites like CNN.com

@speedwell: Oh man, I'm so sorry but as you were describing your cloak all I could envision is that story that Consumerist did on the International Male catalog. Sorry but I'm killing myself laughing now LOL!

It was a long time ago, but I still regret spending over $400 on my Sony MiniDisc player. It seemed cool at the time, but it became obsolete rather quickly.

My dad got scammed this way when he shipped something he sold on craigslist. He thought it was fine because he got payment via paypal and used delivery confirmation. Buyer claimed he received an empty box and disputed the transaction with paypal. It's not right, but my dad lost the dispute. So he was out the item AND the money. People suck.

This may sound lame because it's such a pedestrian purchase, but for some reason it has stuck with me and it's the first thing I thought of. About 5 years ago I bought a pair of pants. Nothing super expensive like a Wii, maybe $40-$50 (although for me that was a lot of money). I tried them on, bought them, then put them on the next morning. All of a sudden I realize these are hideous pants. High waisted, tapered leg, baggy-butt mom-style pants. What the hell was I thinking in that dressing room! I'd lost the receipt and couldn't return them. I'm still can't believe I did that.

FUCK That was the LAST "Limited" collectors edition game I'll ever buy. I got it, opened it. Was like "Wow, what the hell am I going to do with this helmet?"
I then proceeded to box it up, and now it's in storage.

I also have an HP All-In-One (Printer/scanner/fax) that I got for free for beta testing for them. What PISSES ME OFF is that the color cartridges EXPIRE randomly. They aren't dead or dry, no no.. they are just suddenly too old. If a color cartridge is expired, it still won't let you print with just black ink or even receive faxes with just black ink. Freaking hunk 'o junk.

As long as your taste in games is fairly mainstream, the video games thing is pretty true. However, certain games, particularly niche RPGs, can actually increase in value or be surprisingly difficult to find used at all (check out the prices on USED copies of Suikoden II or Panzer Dragoon Saga).

First time car buyer who got SCREWED! 10% interest and now I seriously doubt I'll be able to refinance with the credit market the way it is now.

The thing collected dust. Then Mario Kart came out. Resurrected. Then dust. Now, I just got Order Up and it's being used again, as well as taking it with me when I visit friends, but still, a lot of money.

So my biggest regret is a black Coach bag. Beautiful, but too small for my needs and I'm too poor to be spending over $400 on a bag that hangs in my closet.

Oh well, live and learn.

Luckily, I was able to sell it to an incoming freshman 3 years later.

@TimmyGUNZ: 15-minute charge time = pumping current into battery = battery heats up too much = bad for battery = battery wont hold a charge for long after 6 months...

im sticking to eneloop with 8 hour charge time.... been using for a year, hasnt seen any decrease in charge hold

@AngrySicilian: cheaper?...

Wii is a close second though. It sits envious of my 360 and PS3 since the gimmick of it wore off about 15min after I bought it.

I love my Wii!! I've had it for about 6 months now and I play something almost every day.

I've been playing Wii Fit every morning for about 30-40 before hopping in the shower. I'm weird and play with the sound down while listening to Morning Edition on NPR. It doesn't make up for REAL exercise, but it's a nice way to start the morning.

I'm also hooked on Zelda, Bully and World of Goo.

So $600 of camera later and guess what? It's a paperweight. For a while he took pictures and did some really nice pieces, but that only lasted a few months. Now it comes in handy a few times a year when we need an especially high-res photo. Hardly worth $600. Oh, and he still has a terrible electronics habit.

I rode it to work exactly TWICE before being hit by a jerkoff that ran a red light then took off and left for dead.

I was fine other than a concussion -- and thank god I WAS wearing that dorky helmet because it was shattered and that would have been my head.. my brains leaking out of my cracked skull onto the asphalt.

My bike ended up being fine too, but I decided that I didn't want to die on the way to work, so I put the bike in the garage and I have not taken it out for a single ride since.

Btw, I'd cheerfully walk, but I happen to live in a nice area, but work in a incredibly scary area so that's not possible. I did try walking a few times in the summer, but since I have to walk though an area known for prostitution, men would actually pull over and ask me if I was dating. And for the record, I do not look like nor dress like a prostitute, unless conservative business attire is now the standard for street walkers. Men suck (no offense to ya'll, but seriously-- Gross.) The last straw was when the crack ho, who was wearing a skirt so short you could actually see her nekkid va-jayjay, one sock and one high heel on her feet, followed me for two blocks saying, "gimmie a cigarette. Gimmie a cigarette. gimmie a cigarette. Gimmie a ciagartte. Gimme a cigarette." End of my walking to work adventures.

I'd take the bus but since I have to take two obscure buses, it would take me 45-50 minutes each way. It takes me about 10 minutes to drive, so the car wins.

So. Yeah. $800 bike sitting in the garage doing nothing.

The build quality and fun quotient was so disappointing. I just wanted to play with my sister's totally awesome Aircraft Carrier, but noooooo.

Even the commercial for Super Van City is lame, unlike the totally badass carrier commercial.

In a effort to save money you and your friends can give each other lap dances for free. :-P

@kingmanic: Trauma Center is entrertaining as well.

Actually, now that I think of it, the entire Xbox 360 itself.

It worked out to about $80 a scan. I think I still have it.

Palm T/X. I curse it everytime I use it. Yes, I do use it because it cost so freakin much I cant just toss it. Several steps backward from the Palm III I was replacing.

HP Color Laserjet 2600n. The replacement cartridges cost more than what I originally paid for the hulking thing. My old b&w laserjet performed better.

Any version of ACT after 2000. Anti-productivity!

Most of the bluetooth headsets I have tried. No, Mom, I don't have a party line.

The jury is still out on my brand new sharp plasma TV.

I've got one, and a 360, and while I don't play either as much as I like, I don't regret either purchase. They're both incredibly fun for party style play, and I don't care what other people say, Wii doesn't get old.

Another thing I do is I try to stick to yard sales for frivolus spending, I don't feel so bad about it if I am spending under 2$ an item if I don't use it or I throw it in a pile after a couple months of enjoying it. But this is a little hard to do when you live in NY and the weather is cold more than it is warm for yard sailing.

Some things I regret buying, Pokemon Cards, any toy or fad collectible, video games for full price (I have learned they ALL drop in price eventually) especially when you have too many and cannot play those full priced ones soon enough.

I have also learned to ignore the fads and the hype (for pretty much anything) and try to stray away from those things because things that are overhyped most often lead to disappointment and feelings of regret. Helps that I am an adult as well.

I won my Wii in a contest so I have no complaints, but I would have never, ever paid full price for it, especially for all the endless accessories that you seem to need to play certain games. I try to avoid any game that takes an extra accessory and I only buy my used games off ebay for the most rock bottom price I can possibly find and not from the ripoff store Gamestop.

Fortunately, I never clicked "buy now"!

I'm leaning towards moving to cuba to become a bartender.

@cellardoor: nice name :D

Damn.

She finally did, and it's beautiful. Long black wool with a silk lining and a simple silver clasp. She finished it a month before I moved to new orleans.

I feel your pain.

@edicius: Do you have an animation school in your area (and, needless to say, an interest in animation)? My fiance has an animation degree, he was 29 when he graduated, and he was able to work his schedule around classes OK. Your film classes would really come in handy.

@kabuk1: A professional makeup artist I knew once told me that Maybelline was his favorite makeup. I can beat that. If you have a 99 Cents Only store in your area, go see if they have any more Aziza powder foundation. It will beat anything else you've ever bought for coverage, attractive even color, and staying power. And 99 cents a pop! I got in there when they had just restocked and bought every last one they had, 24 of them. I'm going to Hell, but I'll look good on the way. :D

@serreca: Jaunty pillows and throws will absolutely resurrect the room. Use no more and no less than about ten percent of the accent color. Trust me.

I realize there might be a greater quantity of top-level titles on the 360, but I buy my games sparingly and only after I'm certain they're worth the investment ($60 is NOT cheap).

That said, my only complaint about the system is, of course, price.

Back in 2001, I bought a '68 Road Runner for $6500. By the time I got done paying for the body work, the new motor and OD trans, the road racing suspension, and other sundries the total tabe was north of $60k. And since CA uses prune juice for premium gas, I have to fill up with 95 octane at %5.50/gallon. So now it sits in the garage. I think the battery is dead.

Number two would be a 2001 PT Cruiser - my first new car, bought at msrp when they were still hard to get. I liked the car, but everything went wrong with it. Someone stole all four wheels the first month I had it. The entire gauge cluster burned out. The transmission controller went out. The sensor that makes the check engine light work broke. The air bag light would come on every time it rained. The clock would keep falling behind. It got rear-ended by a hit-and-run driver. I hit a pothole and broke a wheel and a strut. I think it was jinxed. It cost me way too much in payments and even more in repairs.

[chicago.craigslist.org]

(Sorry, too easy.)

...twice.

@Ben Popken: OK, I dragged it out. It isn't lined (only the hood is, in purple velvet). But it is heavy and full, made from a good thick black wool, and is not feminine apart from the purple. It's longish on my five and a half feet and I'm built like a truck (a rather attractive truck IMO), so it would fit a man who was up to six feet tall, I think. It has a Viking-style cloak clasp at neck and chest. It's clean and been kept under plastic, and I was being melodramatic about the moths (we have none). I'll send pics as soon as I can talk my dude into doing something constructive with his digital SLR. :)

@endersshadow: I know it turned cold, but not that cold. I have a nice furry jacket that is as much as I can wear in this climate.

You might even find it cheap now. Just try not to play those 30-40 hours in one sitting...

It's a pain to set up, it weighs a ton, all the directions are in Japanese, it cost $400 dollars ($200 of which was for shipping), it requires an adapter to use in the states.

2) My house. Because I co-owned it with my jerk EX. I should have bought it MYSELF and then had redshirt guy pay rent.

Mystery box from ThingFling. I still have nightmares about cell phone flashlights :-\

And I am mad at myself, because if I had just put the brakes on and really *read* the user reviews, I could've saved myself a couple hundred smackers.

Becky

* 2MB worth of RAM chips and an Intel RAM card for my 8088 computer, back in '86. For $2K.

* Every accessory and component I ever purchased for my Commodore 64 and 128.

* A 1995 Ford Winstar

2) La-z-boy Sectional - $3000 I wish I had back

On the other hand, I love my Wii.

a sumo sac. fortunately i sent it right back without losing a cent. that thing was horrible. love my wii. bartered a stupid blender and original xbox for it. we use it all.the.time.

i will add my best purchase... my car discman that i bought when i was 17. saved up my 220$ in the envelope, and used it every day. took great care of it because it was such a huge purchase for me at the time (13 years ago!).

I love my Wii - I can't believe so many people regret that.... Apparently they haven't played Mariokart....

Anyway, I get the TV, hook my Xbox 360 up to it, and my heart sunk. The TV suffered from horrible ghosting. I know that to some degree, all LCDs ghost, but this ghosted like a TV with a 16ms response time, when it was, in fact, a 6ms set. It was awful. I couldn't play a game without getting a brutal headache.

So, I knew I couldn't return it to Newegg because of their no returns on TVs policy, so I figured that I'd take advantage of the one year warranty. I called Sharp and they had awesome over the phone customer service. Everyone was nice and it seemed like they were trying to help, but this was all surround with promises of callbacks that never happened.

Finally, they let me speak to their top techs who had me send them pictures of video of the problem. After they looked at the evidence, one of their techs said "oh yeah, that is one broken TV."

I was elated. I thought that after two months of trying to get somebody to help me on the phone, it was finally going to be fixed. I took it to a repair shop an hour away, since it was the only certified repair shop or some deal, and the guy told me that the ghosting was a result of some TVs not being compatible with next gen consoles. I knew that was crap and I called him on it. He then said it was due to normal LCD ghosting. I told him that there was no way it was normal and that a tech from Sharp even agreed that it was broken.

Anyway, he wouldn't fix it. I called Sharp back and the tech, after speaking with the guy at the repair shop, did a 360 and agreed with him that it was normal without actually ever seeing the tv.

At this point, it had been four months since I bought the TV and I was done. I sold the TV as defective and took a huge loss on it.

It is because of this that I will never, ever buy a product made by Sharp ever again.

My house. We bought at the peak of the market with no money down a few years ago. It's worth less now than when we bought it and there is a constant stream of problems: floors warping, appliances breaking, etc.

I'm going to change my major to English next month so maybe I can at least get a diploma out of this hellhole. I'll just have to take another 20 classes or so to do it. Worthless friggin' place...

Also- I regret a lot if the high-end makeup I buy, like the stuff from Dillard's & Sephora. I returned a MAC lipstick this week cause I finally admitted to myself that can find the same damn shade at Wal-Mart & there's no reason to spend $15 on a friggin' lipstick.

I see a follow-up article, "What internet purchase do you regret the most" in the making!!

I suppose we only learn by doing.

@Residentdrunkgirl: I heard it thru the grapevine that you could build a lucrative practice registering trademarks and suing upon infringement, both physical and imaginary.

2. The house we bought 2 years ago. I wish we would have not financed it 100% and that we would have gotten something smaller and cheaper.

Got like 9 free HD-DVDs with it, and it's great for upscaling. But it is a canceled format

I bought a *very* used Honda CRX nine years ago for $3500. Primarily, I regret not having the car inspected by a mechanic before buying it. The engine was fine, but the CV joints were shot, the timing belt was old, the battery needed replaced, the AC was busted, and the radiator gave out within two years.

Come to think of it, I regret every used car purchase (and none of the new ones).

* fun for a while.

Most get old really fast and only a few have any serious playability beyond parties. Fire Emblem, Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime 3 and Mario Galaxy. nearly the entirety of the rest is not that great and get old really really fast.

J.K. Best wishes really. Knock on wood and what not.

I'm a little pissed I bought my house when I did, but it was pretty cheap; I just could have gotten a better loan if I had waited. (The original loan was $70k at 6.5% in 2006, it's down to $50k now but the posted rates at BoA are like 5.2%! Is it possible to refi into that for a mere $50k??)

Oh, substantive purchases? My first pack of cigarettes all those long years ago. ;-)

Really, I'm tight with money. I don't think I've purchased anything I've regretted. Ah, wait: two colorful shirts. They're kind of bright, and the color (without the intensity) are nice office colors. Oh, but the intensity! They look like club shirts in regular light! Yuck!

Shallow gas lines, "poly" pipes (the kind that spontaneously burst),a dining room roof that fell in, the discovery of a third, mysterious fuse box with 6 glass fuses in an unused closet, odd settling of the foundation and a master bedroom that is forever insisting on seceding from the rest of the house to become an independent casita- oh, the good times never end.
The movie The Money Pit is the G-rated version of our home improvement, bank account depleting nightmare.

And all of you that sold yours or gave it away will be begging for it back once Punch Out Wii comes out.

i thought i "needed" more games .... not even half of them were worth it

My 500 shares of General Motors.
crap.

@Boatski: wanna sell it to me?

i would say my Energizer 15-minute rechargable batteries... i was naive and didnt know about batteries at that time, blame my 13 year old brain

I had such high hopes, but after playing through it in a week, it has zero replay value. I sold it and its evil DRM on eBay for half what I paid for it.

Two years later I'm now a dedicated hand stitcher with no intention of ever using the thing. It's sitting in the corner, still in the original sealed box, collecting dust. I really need to get rid of it.

@speedwell: lol, I just read your story. I'm done with my bad dealings though... that's too bad you have yours with you to remind you :)

@Roy Hobbs: Yeah, I usually feel pretty dumb about buying tequila shots afterwards too.

No bugs. Just really, really, really tedious after the millionth beserker native/merc comes after you.

I would almost say GTA IV for the PC, the initial setup is an exercise in torture. But it's been as fun and rewarding as I had hoped after I got past the MMA10 errors. Rockstar sold out to Microsoft with Games for Windows, but they are still getting plenty of quality time from the Tech.

All the while my friends are usuing $150 off brand AK-47's they bought on eBay that work great.

Mine would be the wii also. Mainly because I bought it and 3 controllers and a bunch of other accessories and games. Spent about 600 the day I got it. Ended up selling it a few months after I got it for about 200 dollar loss. Don't know why I got it since I like online games and rpgs plus I am too lazy to do stuff with the controller.
Also I regret buying a psp when I did because like a three weeks after the new ones that you could hook tvs up to came out. I still like the psp but wish I would've waited.

@mcjake: yeah, maybe awesome was the wrong word. the convertible part was awesome, the rest of the car, meh.

The thing is such a children's fad toy. Good for some, but I thought Nintendo would create some really stellar channels. Its all hype. I can't sell it though, my mother in law bought it. She would kill me if she found out it was gone.

@downwithmonstercable: I'll trade you a beautiful winter cloak for it. No, wait, you sold it. Sorry.

Its got to be my house. After years of working my way to financial stability, I took the pplunge and bought a house in spring, 2007. Yep, at the peak of the market here. Now, it looks like I amy be out of this job in a year, and there is no way I will sell the house for what I gave for it. I love my house and it is far from a mansion, but I wish I had stayed renting. Even though I have a good mortgage (VA)I am worried about it.

On the frivolous side of the house, it was the guitar for my daughter. She won't touch it.

Ben, how much do you want for the Wii? I just want to get WiiFit, it's been a huge help for my balance problems after a TBI, but it seems crazy to spend all that money for one application.

My wife and I live in seattle. At the beginning of the summer a couple years ago we bought a mazda miata. it was awesome. Then winter came and it was almost un-drivable in heavy rain, the slightest bit of frotst or snow, and any kind of icy roads. We had it less than 7 months before we sold it.

Fun car if you live somewhere where it's summer year-round.

Oh, Christ.

I was scheduled to go on a business trip to Norway for a month in the dead of winter. Egged on by my D&D-geek inner child, I had a beautiful lined, hooded, full-circle wool cloak made for me. Five HUNDRED dollars, which for the material and workmanship was an exceptional deal. It looked good on and it felt good on.

They sent me to Dubai instead. I live in Houston. The beautiful thing, and I can't bear to part with it (but I can't bear to look at it), is gathering dust and moths in my closet at the moment.

(cries)

overpriced club drinks!

$80 dress, $40 shoes...worn to company christmas party (fail) for an hour and a half. Do-over, plz?

I enjoy my Wii/Xbox 360 but the PS3 gets no burn