What is your "I could have been rich" story?

In 2010 I built a new computer. I was interested in bitcoin from a “this is technically neat” category. I set it up and was able to mine dozens of coins per day.

I did. It was all set up and working. But it generated a lot of heat in my upstairs So. Cal. Apartment. So I stopped. Just deleted the coins because they were pretty worthless then.

I don’t get too upset though because I never would have held them to $50k each. I would have sold them for a buck each.

But I “could have” if it wasn’t so hot out. ;)

I once got a reddit DM from a guy offering to be my sugar daddy. All I had to do was give up family, friends, hobbies, career, move in with him and have his babies. He assured me I would want for nothing. I turned him down, but I was just a simple "yes" away from being so wealthy and happy. He was also highly complimentary of my looks, despite never seeing even a photo of me, so I know he wasn't shallow.

Edit: ok, that's all a lie. I got like 6 DMs like this. And that's when I turned direct messaging off for my reddit account.

Nearly 30 years ago, I worked for a tiny li'l anti-virus software company that got acquired by one of the big boys, and everyone's performance-based options they were holding were suddenly worth a lot. Being hungry for career growth at the time, I'd left the company and forfeited those options. Less than 6 months later, they announced the sale of the company.

My options woulda been worth a few million at the time, maybe double that in today's money. Importantly, it would've set me up with a nice house, car, etc, without any debt, in my early 20s.

Not rich, but certainly comfortable.

I sold about $200 in Bitcoin I mined back in the early days, like 2009 and 10. Missed out on over $80 million.

I had the idea to offload machine learning to GPUs back in the early 00's. I was working for a company doing number plate recognition back then, so I was even in a position to act on my idea... but my boss thought I was nuts.

I'm not sure how much money I would have made, but it's got to be better than this!

Had the ability to buy in on Google right after they went public - passed on it

Had the ability to buy in on Apple in the mid 1990s -passed

Had the ability to buy bitcoin at $5 a coin, could have put in $5k at the time -passed

Had the ability to buy in on Amazon shortly after they went public -passed

Ebay -passed

Starting to see a trend?

Decided to OpenSource instead of Software Patent (as my employer was urging me). Nowadays, that technique is used in every decent Image CDN + compression tool. Still proud to see it everywhere. Maybe it wouldn't have made it if had been patented.

In 2009 I had 13k AMD shares at an average cost basis of $2.12.

I sold them in 2011 for $8/share.

Those shares are worth around $1.5M today.

Back in 1988 I had a school project with a few people, one of whom came from a wealthy family. The project was regarding the stock market, and each team was given a certain amount of imaginary money to invest, to see who would win out at the end of the semester. My friend with the wealthy family came back with a recommendation from his father, of course, and we won the contest easily.

The recommendation? Put all our funds into Berkshire Hathaway.

I had the golden goose egg right in front of me and never invested a dime.

I was ready to drop $2,000 on AMD stock when it was $3 a share. Someone talked me out of it.

While it wouldn't have made me "rich", I'd be much better off than I am now.

My great uncle was a nice dude fucked up from war. It made he introverted and he turned to trucking and the road to make ends meet. It was basically all he ended up doing. He never married or had kids, and stacked up all this cash. Before he died, he had put 1 million in cash in a suitcase, put it in the trunk of a car, and gave it to my grandparents. They couldn't get the trunk open, didn't investigate, sold the car.

Not super rich, but we'd be doing substantially better financially if this went differently.

The year: 2020. I was playing with the stock market and decided to buy 10,000 shares of the cheapest stock, just because it was funny to say I had 10k shares in anything. It cost about $800.

A couple of months later, lo and behold, my $800 was worth about $5000! "Holy shit," I said, "I made money on penny stocks!" I promptly sold all of it.

Several months later, I check on it again. The company has announced new technology and its share price has skyrocketed, from a few cents per stock to $25. I could have made $250k, but instead made $5k.

My parents are fairly rich but stingy and boomers. I recently stood up for my principles and my kids and I give myself 1:6 odds they’ll cut me from the will as the last surviving child.

I mined one Bitcoin back in college with my home computer. Now, I did sell it for a lot of money and I'm not complaining, don't misunderstand, but hoo boy. If I mined more? Goodness.

It took like a week or more to get. I was living in a bonus room with basically no air conditioning at the time, just an okay at best window unit. This was during the summer. My room got miserable lmao. And I couldn't use my computer for anything, especially not gaming. So when I finally got my payout and went to see how much it was worth it felt stupid to keep going. It was worth like 10 bucks at the time. Pretty much nowhere took them either. I think one of the few things you could buy was alpaca wool socks or something.

As an aside, I think the only thing I ever directly bought with them was a Windows 10 key from r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap that stopped working. I believe because the user sold it again to someone else. I think I got that for $20 which was a better bargain but long term that would've been like $200 at least because of how much more Bitcoin is worth. The insane volatility of it is stressful and I'm happy to not have any crypto "investments" today.

I was big into crypto at the very beginning. Lost a hard drive that now has about $8 million on it somewhere.

I wanted to buy $100 of bitcoin in HS and couldn't figure out how. Would have been like $60,000,000 :ccc

I bought Bitcoin in highschool. Not much, though, because it was just a neat concept. There was no reason it would actually skyrocket in value (still isn't).

I had a teacher ask me for help investing in it, too. There was another guy in Canada at around the same time that turned that exact situation into a nice ponzi scheme.

I bought some GameStop when it was $10 but chickened out and sold it a few days before it went to like $420 a share cuz I thought I was being baited by wallstreetbetters. I only later found out a close friend of mine who is a generally responsible investor was heavily in that and sold at like $200~ to pay off all his medical debt. He's not rich either, but financially better off than before that happened.

I don't mess with stocks now.

Didn't get "rich" per se, but I got in on dogecoin when it was at a penny, missed the peak, and ended up selling in the 30 cent range. I also picked up a ton of oil stocks in March 2020 when it bottomed out that I later sold for more than 15x their original value.

The irony is that I invested in dogecoin because Robbing Hood locked down investments into Gamestop. I didn't realize that would be such a lucky development at the time.

Those investments paid off my student loans and got me a down payment on a condo. I still have five-figures in my investment account that I'm growing into early retirement. My current focus is gambling stocks, in large part because every election year it seems like there's a smattering of states legalizing online sports betting. (MO and NE have it on the ballot for this year.)

Not fuck you money or 'rich', but life-changing.

My finger was hovering over the "buy" button for $10000 worth of Bitcoin when one Bitcoin cost $50.

I don't know about rich, but my household would be much more well off had my biological mother not been a mentally unstable gold-digging asshole.

One parent had a growing business when I was super young, they brought home well into the 6 figures. However two things happened 1: the internet started getting bigger so that started to hurt their business and 2: the 2008 housing crash happened and for a business that worked with banks on mortgages (I was too young to fully understand what the business did) it was fatal. Then we were dirt poor! The family never really recovered but after many years we did manage to get on our feet, then a parent died and shit went down hill again lmao.

I could've grown up a rich kid, instead I grew up with a family oats pot for meals. Though I'm probably a healthier grounded human for it.

Idk how well this would actually sell but years ago in my early 20s, I came up with the idea for a beer coozie for 40oz bottles.

40s are great if you are poor and want just enough of a buzz but unless you chug them, they get warm halfway through. Which is also why 12oz cans/bottles are probably also more appealing.

Just a big ass coozie to keep your Bud Ice cold in a Sunday afternoon of porch drinking.

I bought 100 shares of Gamestop when it was $4 in November 2020 and sold at around $10

I played the stock market game in grade school and noticed this one stock, BRKHA that was moving thousands of dollars daily (and was occasionally dipping into the hundreds). Considering the others would only move a fraction of a dollar daily it was a goal to get one share for the game. I did and ended up winning.

I should have tried to pressure my parents into at least one share. By the time I was 18 it would have been worth 70k, and these days it's up to.. Nearly 700k per share.

I would've likely sold it on my 18th birthday and been able to languish a bit longer than I did. All in all it wouldn't have been worth doing.

Not rich, but definitely more well off. As a one off thing, bought myself a scratch ticket and almost won somewhere around $20,000. Luck almost shined on me.