[Nathan]

What is the best investment you ever made? What is the worst?

[sfharper]

The worst investment was made by my mom. She bought all of us kids 10 shares of Flaky Jakes. This is one type of investment to beware of, a start up where they are building stores faster than they are financing them. A good company will get a small number of stores operating at a profit before opening new stores. In a way, these resemble a pyramid scheme with the first investors getting lots of growth in the stock and the last losing everything when the company goes bust.

[workingdad]

The best investment I made was for a bank that went public. We got an IPO at 10 and when the time came to pay my student loans, I sold at various times and made about 80 percent.
MSN money has a regular column about great stocks under five dollars, for those who are just getting started and don't have a lot of money to risk.

[mcmama]

My worst experience was in the 80s, getting killed in the gold futures market. Gold tanked before I sold. I don't do futures now.

[beth]

Best investment: Not selling the house I was moving out of and taking a bigger loan to finance the second. House prices soared. Worse investment: A float tank

[MommytoBenjamin]

My best weekly investment is a Sunday newspaper that has coupons. Spending an hour of my time each week clipping and filing saves my family $400 a month off our grocery bill. That extra money is now going into our 401(k) plans. Fortunately, we haven't had a really bad investment (yet).

[MJ7]

Worst "investment"--more like a financial screwup! My dh sold our car which was ballooned to be out of neg. equity 12 mo from the date at 1% interest. He wanted a truck and traded our car, giving us $4000 negative equity which got rolled in and the truck was at 3.3% interest. WELL, that darned truck was gutless and I was MAD! He took it back to the dealership and exchanged it for his Tracker which is still not as nice as the origional car. We didn't want to put $$ down so there wasn't a lot to choose from that would eat up the neg. equity. So, once we drove the care off the lot we were in the hole more! I think our neg equity is at about 5k from 7k and that 3.3% rate, we lost when we got the Tracker at 5.75% because our FICA score went down do'h!

Our best investment was this house. We purchaced 14 mo ago new for 350k and area comps put our home now at almost 500k!!! Even if the market dips (perhaps likely), we live in a great location and don't think we'll be hurt too much. Too bad rates are getting so high, we could cash out a tad of our equity and pay down that car!

[Marymary]

My best move was to sell all my tech stocks in Feb. 2000.
Most of the money I've made on the stock market was on Qualcomm stock in 1999.
My worst move was to procrastinate and not to buy a couple multi family houses in 2001.

[JMBisBack]

Best : Sold properties in the big city and moved to a state with lower property taxes and lower cost of living; We were able to buy a house and had a lot of money left from the proceeds of our property in the big city. Increasing crime rates in the city was a major factor in our decision to move plus the worsening pollution in the city. Overall we had a windfall profit.

Worst: I lost a lot from stock investments overseas in the late 90s when the Asian market fell. Didn't see it coming and wasn't able to get out in time.

[katytibbs]

Best was when I took advice to balance stocks wtih bonds in my 401k in 1999 and bought bonds, so that when the market tanked, I didn't lose too much.