You very probably have not all recommended insurances in your country of residence or your mandatory insurance doesn't cover everything you'd want it to cover. Same goes for savings, you don't save enough for old age and emergencies. Basically if at some point you would have had to do something to prepare for the future, you didn't do it.
The short version about insurance is this: Never insure anything where you can go "damn it" and pay in cash, the same rule goes for deductibles. On the reverse, insure anything that you absolutely have to pay for and would financially ruin you. Some possible areas are your house, liability insurance and health care cost. Google "necessary insurance" or similar.
The short version about savings retirement plans is this: Use google to find out if your government provides sufficient provisions for retirement, if you plan on retiring at all. If not, look for ways to provide for old age and/or invest money, the sooner you start, the better. Hold about three months worth of living expenses in the most liquid form possible to cover emergencies. To ensure saving, order your bank to transfer a set amount of cash every month to a seperate bank account which you can not access on the go.
A couple addendums:
1) If you have a family, your death goes on the "would financially ruin you" list. If anyone needs you, you need life insurance - and term is extremely cheap(I just sold a couple half a million each for $50/mo), so don't use money as an excuse unless you're destitute or extremely ill. To a lesser extent, disability insurance(though it tends to be pricier).
2) You may not want to ever retire, but the human body in old age is a very insistent creature. Plan on retiring. Better to have and not need than need and not have.
This is the first post of the 2015 repository rerun, which appears to be a good idea. The motivation for this rerun is that while the 12 repositories (go look them up, they're awesome!) exist and people might look them up, few new comments are posted there. In effect, there might be useful stuff that should go in those repositories, but is never posted due to low expected value and no feedback. With the rerun, attention is shifted to one topic per month. This might allow us to have a lively discussion on the topic at hand and gather new content for the repository.
The first repository to be rerun is the Boring Advice Repository, because of... on a whim.
Enter original motivation (by Qiaochu_Yuan):
The Boring Advice Repository is filled with lots of diverse advice, I've summarized some of it in a comment below.
So what should go here? To go with Qiaochu_Yuan again (adding emphasis):
I don't know if you should post new advice here or in the original repository. Perhaps search the old repository with ctrl+f (when on windows) and if you don't get results, post it here.