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  • This article is part of Had I Known, Zikoko’s theme for September 2025, where we explore Nigerian stories of regret and the lessons learnt. Read more Had I Known stories here.

    Harry* (25) isn’t who you’d call a crypto enthusiast. Before 2025, he’d only had one stint trading crypto. But after a friend claimed to have inside info on meme coins and encouraged him to invest his money, he went all in.

    In this story, he talks about starting his trading journey with £1k, building his portfolio to $5k in three months, and then losing it all overnight. 

    As Told To Boluwatife

    Man holding his head in despair

    It started like a typical day. That morning in March 2025 when I realised I’d lost $5000 in one fell swoop.

    Nothing pointed to that morning being any different from the usual. The day was bright; birds might have even been cheering in the background. I picked up my phone the moment I opened my eyes and launched Telegram. 

    I’d been in a few crypto group chats on Telegram since my friend, Don*, introduced me to meme coin trading in January, and every morning, I’d check the groups before I did anything else. It was my morning routine. 

    The groups were usually a flurry of activities, people sharing screenshots and chatting excitedly about how a coin they traded had done five or ten times the initial amount. However, the groups were awfully quiet that morning.

    I went on Twitter and scrolled through the timeline. Trump had done one crazy shit again. I think he said something about electric vehicles. He was always in the news for some reason, and I didn’t really pay attention to whatever was happening.

    After some minutes of lazy scrolling, I left the app to check my meme coin wallet. What I saw there made me doubt whether my eyes were working: WOLF token had tanked and lost over 80% of its value. My units worth $5000 had dropped to about $200 overnight. What was going on?

    I texted Don, and he called me two minutes later. 

    Don: “Bro”

    Me: “Bro!”

    Don: “Brooooo”

    Me: “Fuck!”

    We didn’t need to say anything more. It was obvious: the money was gone.

    The funny thing is, we might have had a chance to withdraw our money a few weeks before this event. A mutual friend had shared a YouTube video of a pastor prophesying about the crypto world taking a huge loss, but we didn’t give the video a second thought. 

    We’d been trading meme coins since January, and there was no indication of trouble. We just had to hold out until April, make big money and dump the project. No one expected things to play out the way they did.

    Maybe it wouldn’t have been a great loss if we had started taking out our profit right from the start. I probably wouldn’t have even tried meme coin trading if Don hadn’t convinced me to. 

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    Back in December 2024, my aunt, who lives abroad, gifted me the equivalent of £1000 in USDT. I complained that she didn’t give me anything for Christmas, so she sent me the money. I didn’t expect that much, so I didn’t know what to do. I left the money in my wallet for a few weeks. Then, in January, I told Don about my windfall, and he introduced me to the meme coins.

    I knew little about crypto, but I wasn’t a newbie. In 2023, I had a trading stint when my blockchain writer cousin introduced me to Harmony Coin, and I flipped $50 into $200. The coin later crashed, and many people lost their money. 

    I concluded that crypto was a zero-sum game. One person wins at the cost of another. When people take out all their money, the coin’s value is reduced, and others lose. You won’t always win, and that’s just how it works.

    After that incident, I took my mind off crypto until Don brought up meme coins. Trump and Elon had their bromance going on, and it looked like crypto would be on an upward bullish run for a long time. Don was the crypto head, and he showed me how I could grow my money by trading instead of just leaving it in my wallet. He said he had insider info on meme coins that would scale.

    So, I agreed.  

    We created two crypto wallets for the transactions — we didn’t want to put all our eggs in one basket. So, even if we incurred losses on one wallet, the other would be fine. Don mostly handled the trades, but I had access to both wallets and could see the transactions happening in real time. 

    We — mostly Don — also regularly tracked the coins on Twitter and Dex Screener. Viral trends drive meme coins, and you can follow the buzz online to predict if it’ll have traction. It’s almost like how people who follow the stock market can tell when a company is about to lose value because of how often they track the progress. 

    The first coin we tried was Trump’s coin ($TRUMP). I gave Don £200, and we made a £700 profit in two days. 

    Instead of taking out the profit, we put it all back in the market. That’s how we started. I kept giving Don more money, and he spread it across different meme coins. We diversified our portfolio like that to hedge against big losses. You never know when you could get rug-pulled, so it was safer not to bet on one coin. 

    Every day, Don watched out for meme coins generating buzz on Dex Screener, coins that could potentially get picked up by crypto whales, and we’d put money in them. We also had Telegram bots trading for us. It was a fun time.

    By March, our portfolio had grown to $5000. Then we made our first mistake: we put all the funds in WOLF. To be fair, the coin looked good. It reached a market cap of $42m in two days. I thought, “Even if we make five times this amount, we’re good.” We could’ve made bank.

    Instead, we woke up to $200. It was an obvious rug pull. We couldn’t even try to rebuild our portfolio because there was no guarantee that the coin would regain any value. So, we counted our losses and took out the $200. 

    Crypto giveth, crypto taketh. 

    For a few days, water stopped tasting like water to me. I lost my appetite and didn’t even want to look at my phone. But then, I figured there was no use crying over spilt milk. People face worse situations. The money wasn’t even in my account, so I guess it helped to make it not feel real. 

    Don took the loss much harder than I did. It took him months to get over it. We’d have shared the money, and his share was supposed to take him out of the trenches. The plan was that he wouldn’t have to work all year. My guy eventually had to find a 9-5 job.

    He even offered to find money and pay me back at some point, but I told him to forget it. We went into it together. 

    If I could do it all over again, I’d have taken out my profits from the start — at least I’d have put my money in the real world. 

    However, I’m never doing that shit again. Crypto is not for me. You have to dedicate time and sleepless nights to battle bots run by supercomputers just to get crumbs while some people are raking in profit from these coins. The worst thing to do is to follow influencers in the cryptoverse. Some of them have insider information and are behind these rug pulls. 

    My advice to anyone reading this: Don’t do crypto, you’ll cry. The winners will always be fewer than the losers. It’s even worse when you can see those losses happen in a linear, real-time swoop. Just don’t do it.

    Me, I know I’ll never do it again. I’ve counted my losses, and I’m moving on. Life continues. 

    *Names have been changed for the sake of anonymity. 

    Do you have a story of regret? Share it with us by filling this form.

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  • Every day, we gain new insight that often makes us wish we could revisit a past decision and take a different approach for better results, especially regarding financial decisions.

    Forex traders wish they’d made better predictions after a loss, gamblers regret certain betting decisions after negative results roll in, and everyday Nigerians wish they’d bought more stocks before the prices went up. In many cases, these situations can be fixed by making better decisions.

    But what do similar regrets look like for older Nigerians who might no longer have as much time to fix them? We spoke to four Nigerians aged 50+ who shared their biggest financial regrets and the alternative decisions they’d have made if they knew what they know now.

    “I shouldn’t have invested in a cyber café”

     — Okorie*, 54

    It took a couple of trials and errors to accept that I wasn’t cut out for business. But the biggest error I made was investing all my money to set up a cyber café in 2012.

    I’d just lost my job at an automobile company where I was a parts manager. The company made my role redundant for some office politics-related reason, but they gave me a ₦2m severance pay. I decided I was too old at 41 to start looking for a new job, so I decided to focus on a business. 

    I reasoned that my earlier business ventures failed because I was dividing my attention between them and my regular job. I’m not sure exactly how I got the idea to set up a cyber café, but it felt like a good idea. 

    I lived close to a university and figured that students would need a place to access the internet and print documents. Also, there weren’t any cyber cafés around, so there was no competition for me. In retrospect, that should’ve been my first warning sign. 

    Feeling optimistic, I took out my ₦1m savings from the bank, added it to my severance pay, and rented an office space. The space cost ₦500k/year, and I used the rest of the money to buy two computers, a commercial printer and sort other set-up needs. 

    Business was bad from the first day I opened the shop. It turned out that most of the students did their printing inside the school, where it was cheaper due to competition. Also, people didn’t need cyber cafés as much anymore because of smartphones. They only came if they had to do group projects and assignments, and needed a computer to type. 

    In hindsight, I should’ve done extensive market research before dropping all that money on an idea, or better still, consulted people who had better business sense.

    I’m not sure I made up to 10% of my investment when I shut down a year later. I didn’t know I’d still have to spend money to maintain the computers and printers. By the end of the year, I had no money to renew my rent, so I just packed it up.

    I can’t remember how much I sold the computers and printer now, but I’m sure I didn’t use the money for anything reasonable because I’d have remembered. I returned to the job market and fortunately got a job within months. I’m still there and religiously saving for retirement with my pension and treasury bills — I have ₦1.8m in the latter. I’ve been burned too much to consider business as a source of income when I retire.

    “I had the chance to buy land, but I let it go”

     — Bayo*, 61

    I lost the chance to own millions of naira worth of real estate because I believed holding money was safer than letting it go.

    In 1993, my wife’s brother tried to sell me land in Satellite Town, Lagos —  two plots of land at ₦65k each. I’d just received a ₦100k windfall from my late dad’s pension settlement money, and my wife wanted me to invest the money.

    There’s nothing she didn’t use to convince me to buy that property. She even volunteered to borrow the balance from people. But I didn’t think it was a good investment. The land was in a “bush” area that didn’t look like it would be developed in years. Besides, buying the land was one thing. What would we build on it?

    I decided to save the money instead. Months later, I used it to remodel our house from a bungalow to a one-storey building so we could rent out the extra space.

    However, my brother-in-law bought a plot in that area and sold it for ₦19m in 2021. I hear that land in Satellite Town goes as high as ₦50m today, even more if it’s in a better area close to the road. 

    That extra floor I built in my house? We stopped renting it out years ago due to problematic tenants. My family occupies all the rooms now. 

    I still think about that property from time to time.

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    “I over-relied on my pension and didn’t utilise loans”

    — Femi*, 64

    Early retirement seemed like a good idea in theory. However, when I retired in 2016, it quickly became clear I wasn’t prepared for it.

    By the time I retired, I had a house with two tenants and a pension account scheduled to pay me ₦120k/month for the next 20 years. I assumed collecting rent and my pension would be more than enough to survive on — ₦120k was good money in 2016. 

    Now, it’s barely enough to sustain me, my wife and our lastborn child for a month. My lastborn is still in university and her tuition fees went from ₦20k to ₦200k in 2023. My older kids still call for financial support once in a while.

    I still get at least ₦1.8m in rent yearly from my tenants, but I can hardly plan around that. Most of the time, I use it to settle loans I took during the year to support my wife’s trading business and handle medical bills. 

    I wish I hadn’t relied so much on my pension. I should’ve followed the footsteps of colleagues who took loans from cooperative associations to build houses and start businesses. I assumed taking loans would be me “doing more than myself” and reducing my monthly take home. 

    But I now realise it would’ve just been a temporary sacrifice for future gain. If I’d taken advantage of those loans, I would’ve had at least one more house to supplement my income. I might have even set up a business and put someone in charge. 

    It’s sad that I’m supposed to be enjoying my retirement now, but I keep thinking about how to make money.

    “I regret staying with my children’s father”

    — Grace*, 55

    Marriage in itself can be good, but it’s my biggest financial regret. I was married to my husband for 20 years before we separated. While we were together, he never held a stable job for three consecutive years.

    As a result, I had to handle our home and children’s expenses. In addition, I had to finance whatever new business venture my husband took an interest in. The businesses always failed, but like a virtuous wife who wanted to protect her husband’s ego, I never questioned him. 

    I allowed him to have the final say on money I worked for because I didn’t want fights. I didn’t want him to think I lacked “respect” because I was the breadwinner. I let him make terrible financial decisions because I wanted him to be the “head of the home”. Money wasn’t the primary reason we eventually separated in 2022, but it played a role.

    Now, I’m five years from retirement without reasonable savings or investments. I know when people were using ₦500k to buy land. Now I can’t think about that unless I have like ₦10m. If I’d left my marriage earlier or not endured the plenty of nonsense I did, I’d have land and property today. 

    I’ve been trying to save as much as possible to have a retirement safety net. I also have my pension to look forward to, but it’s nothing compared to how much I’d have achieved for myself if I hadn’t gotten married, or maybe married a more sensible man.

    *Names have been changed for anonymity.

    NEXT READ: These 10 Money Market Mutual Funds Are Making Nigerians Rich in 2025

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