It’s about the loss of a safety net for me.
the money was a deposit for a house, that is what we’d been saving for - however it also was our savings so if something else had happened that meant we needed a big chunk of money fast, no problem, we’d have dipped into the savings and just have to wait longer to buy.
At the time, we needed a car for work so if our car had died before buying the house, we’d have gone out and replaced it buying a 2nd hand car with our house savings immediately. We had a family member living overseas (long haul destination, not cheap flight distance!), so if she’d had an emergency, we’d have just bought a ticket and gone, no problems. If one of us lost their job, we’d have savings we could dip into to cover bills until they found another.
But the day we bought, we handed over all our savings, all our safety net was gone into this house. Yes we now had a house with it, and yes we were able to continue to save and rebuild our safety net over the next few years, but after having around 7-8 years of a savings pot that was enough to cover all life emergencies we could see ourselves experiencing, it was quite scary to go back to the position of having no financial back up if something went wrong.