Negotiations

Wanna buy a townhouse?

As fun as it's been to quip that I have a second home "up north," owning property in Grand Forks, North Dakota, is getting to be a pain. It gets old paying a mortgage on a house you haven't even seen in over 3 months.

The good news is that I now have two offers on the table and have spent last night and this morning in negotiations. The bad news is neither offer is near the list price, or even what I'd hoped to sell for. And so I'm feeling mopey. It's funny, really -- when I first bought the house I thought that if I resold it at a price that would recoup my closing costs, I'd be happy. Then each year as my new tax assessment came in the mail, I watched the assessed value go up and up and UP and found myself getting excited, thinking of all the money I'd make on my investment. By the time I met with my realtor I was nearly giddy with the thought of the anticipated gains (keep in mind, we are not talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars here...). Now that it looks like I'm going to receive the assessed value of my home (minus realtor commission), I'm totally bummed out. As the negotiations continue, I find myself also negotiating some strange emotional terrain. What's that about?

I claim that money has no power over me. No matter how this deal goes, I'm going to at least break even and likely come out a little ahead and I had a good, stable place to live for a few years. I'm not struggling with foreclosure like so many people today. So what if it won't be enough to invest in another property as I'd begun to dream? So what if it isn't even enough to take that big vacation? Still, I'm bummed.

Ah, what power cash has to claim us.

The good news is that I fully suspect that once the deal is done and the papers are signed and the check is in the bank, I won't give it a second thought. I will have re-negotiated my relationship with money; the cash will have lost its emotional value and go back to just being a number.

We can only hope.