In 1995, I had a chance to buy a lake house on the main body of Nasworthy for $50k. Now it's worth 10 times that.

I don’t derive much pleasure from buying things.
I do enjoy fixing, creating, improving, and modifying.

True.

In the late 60s I had a friend who was a stock broker and he called me with what he called a "Fantastic Offer" on an IPO. Some local guy in Dallas was starting up an new airline call Air Southwest and they were offering stock at $10 but you had to buy in blocks of $1,000. I was in my early 20s, newly married to a school teacher who made less than $7K a year and between us we had an income of about $16-18K. $1K was just not going to happen for me and I passed. A few years later they changed the name to SW Air and the rest is history. I would be a wealthy dude today!

Bought Auto Zone back in early 80s and almost doubled my money. I sold it and it dropped back to where I bought it. My mistake was not buying back in to it and buying something else.

The Lakefront lots in my neighborhood sold for 35K in 1997. Off water were
$2500. I should have bought several. ( there are only 12 waterfonts , 10 Water view. I bought one waterfront and one off water. I sold the off water
for $25000. about 10 years ago. The last unbuilt water front resold several times since '97 , the last sale was over $160,000.

MO

Two condoms!!!

I would have saved a ton of money on braces, select sports, college expenses and weddings.

Wished I had bought the ten acre tract near the entrance of a park on Lake Georgetown for $40000 back in the early 90's. Some beautiful homes in the area nowadays.

Pa kind of wished he had accepted an offer from a couple of UT friends who had decided to form a company but he declined. Frank McBee, who asked Pa to join, and a few of his buddies founded the defense contractor, Tracor.

6+ acres of main lake waterfront on Lake Limestone back in '95/'96...for just under $30K. I think about that one frequently. Things work out the way they are meant to be, I guess. I like waterfront on Lake Travis better.

Got two shares of SWA for Christmas in '73 or '74. Been a performer ever since. Just wish they had had dividend reinvestment the whole time.

Mom wanted Dad to sell some stock in late Aug 1987 to get a new car and pay cash. Dad said let's wait. The loss of value in the stock by the end of October would have paid for 3 or 4 cars.

When I bought this property 7 years ago I should have bought a small farm tractor with an auger, scoop, and mower attachments instead of getting a simple riding mower. I have dug way too many holes by hand for fence posts, planing trees, fixing the pond, etc, as well as hand dug trenches.

My boss's teenage son was telling everybody in the office to buy bitcoin in 2014. I thought I was too smart to take financial advise from a teenager.

I turned down my first job offer right out of college, and took an offer from another company for $8K/year more.

The first offer had attached 100 shares of stock as a sign on bonus. Stock at the time was trading around $30/share. Within a year of me turning it down, stock price was around $100/share and they did a 2 for 1 split. Within three years, stock price was back up to nearly $150 and they did a 4 for 1 split, and then the stock price continued to rise and settled around $85/share.

And to make it worse, that company gave shares and options to each employee quarterly as a bonus, and also had a purchase plan where you could buy stock for a 25% discount of market price.

Instead I took the $8K/year for a dead end job as a tax accountant.

6 years ago when we lived on Padre Island, the old single weirdo that lived next door committed suicide in the master bedroom of that house. He was being investigated for child pornography we were told. The ex-wife from Florida shows up and asks us if we wanted to buy the house, 50 cents on the dollar. I had the cash but just couldn’t bring myself to enter that house much less purchase it. I don’t consider myself superstitious, but it just gave me the creeps. They pulled out child mannequins and little girls clothing out of that place. I never trusted that guy at all, I knew he was a creep.

However, that house on Padre is now tripled in value like many homes in Texas. Would have been a great renter. We were told that because it was suicide and not murder or a crime, that what happened in the house did not have to be disclosed to the new buyer. I never told the nice young folks that bought it either.

lake lot/house for sure