1. A JustFab Subscription

I'm sure many of us have gone down the rabbithole of "oh, a free trial, I'll just have to remember to cancel it" and then forgotten to cancel it and ended up paying money you didn't have for something you weren't going to use.

I wanted a pair of boots for fall, so I ordered a pair on a free JustFab trial, and then went to cancel the trial. I found out that the way to "cancel" your subscription was to go in between the first and fourth of every month and click "skip this month". One month, I forgot to do that. So I figured, okay, thirty dollars was taken out of my account so I might as well claim my free shoes this month. Well, a promotional discount was auto-applied to my cart and I couldn't get rid of it, and you can't use your credit on discounted items, so I would've had to spend another thirty dollars to order the shoes. I never heard back from customer service, and eventually had my more assertive mother call them to cancel my subscription so I wouldn't have to keep going in every month. I didn't end up getting any shoes, and when you're essentially living off your savings from when you used to work a minimum-wage job, thirty dollars is a lot of money to lose.

2. A Fidget Cube

I ended up not using this nearly as much as I thought I would. It's noisy and not discreet at all. My fidget spinner was a much better investment.

3. A Beauty School bleach job

I wanted to get my hair lightened and thought I'd go to a beauty school to 1) save money and 2) support students. As I went in for my appointment, I asked the student doing my hair if it would stay soft because I had worked for years to get it as soft as it was. She assured me I'd be fine. I won't go into the whole story, but essentially:

- There was a lady from Paul Mitchell who was observing the students and quite possibly is the reason I still had hair after I left

- I'm not a hairstylist but I'm pretty sure my scalp wasn't supposed to burn THAT badly

- "We can fix that" and "you can't do that to her hair, what are you doing?" are right up there with "oh, [swearword]" in the category of "things you do not want to hear when there are chemicals in your hair"

- Listen, I'm not saying I was expecting my dark brown hair to be as blonde as the picture I showed her after one session, but she's the one who said "yeah I can do that" and then gave me highlights

- My hair (the highlighted parts) dried with the consistency of straw if I didn't use a deep conditioner, for months. It's still not nearly as soft as it was before I got it bleached, almost 3 years ago.

4. SparkNotes

I had a history paper due on a book I didn't read. I picked up the book and realized it was a lot thicker than I anticipated, so I looked for it on SparkNotes. It wasn't on the official SparkNotes website, but I found a couple SparkNotes-esque subscription services that had it. I got a free trial to one, but had to pay about $30 to use the second one. The free trial one really wasn't giving me enough information, so I grudgingly forked over the money for the second one. Three days later, I found out I got a B on the report and forgot to cancel the free trial, meaning I was charged an additional $40.

5. A bunch of clothes from work

I worked at a thrift store for a year and often found a ton of cute clothes while I was stocking. If the clothes were still there after work, I usually bought some. Why not? They were about $5 apiece at most, and I was making a pretty steady income. Well, soon enough I found myself buying clothes that "might not fit perfectly, but I can make it work" or "this would look really cute with x thing that I don't have yet", or "this would have looked cute on me 3 years ago so I'm gonna see what I can do with it now". I ended up donating back most of what I bought a couple years later, majority of the things unworn since I brought them home and washed them. I could've bought so many nicer things that I would have worn, or saved that money for something else.