I once spent about $5000 just purchasing gold. It was shiny and cool and... shiny! This was back in 2004 when gold was a LOT cheaper than it is today and not going up as fast. I held onto it for a year, trying to salvage something from the impulse purchase, before having to cash it in for a small loss to cover some bills, now days I really wish I had held onto that gold!

Another time, I invested about $4k in a bunch of worthless stocks and eventually lost 90% of that money when all the stocks fell. Another time, when I was single, I spent over $1,000 over two days on hotels and hookers - fortunately I didn't catch anything from that experience.

Now days, when I go hypomanic, I tend to buy books that I think I'll read through and learn everything I need to know from. Technical books, self-help books, Programming books - you name it. Now I got shelves full of books Ive never read and will never read most likely.

On a related topic, anyone want to purchase some books on JSP and XML programming? They're only a few years out of date and the covers look really cool!