Share price plunge - argh

[mummyrunnerbean]

We are buying our first house, and a large chunk of our deposit is some shares I inherited. 3 months ago the price was at a two year high, and I was meant to sell them. Then DS1 was born and I forgot/ procrastinated/ decided a few weeks couldn't hurt. I checked this morning and they've dropped nearly a fifth of their value - we've lost about £5000, and are actually now about £2000 short of the price we've offered for a flat. I feel awful - DP is furious with me. We may have to pull out of our lovely flat. I'm mostly posting for a vent but if anyone has any bright ideas please let me know. I feel sick :-S

What industry are they in? Is it likely to bounce back in another month?

Would dp still be furious if you had sold them, and they went up by £5000 afterward? These things happen

The flat....can you borrow a bit more?

They're BP shares, so things not looking overly rosy. I don't think he'd have minded if I'd sold and they'd gone up. We offered on this flat based on what they were worth then, and I should have sold them straightaway to make sure we had the money. It was the absolute most we could afford. Instead I disappeared into 11 weeks of baby-brained idiocy. We're now approaching exchange, looking at putting the deposit together, and I'm trying frantically to think of ways to magic up £2000. Not sure how I could have been this stupid!

We could borrow more, probably, but at a higher rate which would make life tricky. What a mess.

You have a new baby only a few weeks old?
You're negotiating the purchase of a new flat?

And now you're giving yourself a hard time because you didn't get round to selling some shares or being able to see into the future that they were going to go down?

I'd be a bit kinder to yourself; a healthy baby and a happy mum is far more important than a temporarily deflated share portfolio.

Your shares will come back in price as sure as eggs are eggs. You may just have to wait a while.

They seem to have gone up a bit on Friday at least - is the situation looking any better for you? Have you sold yet? What a stress.

that's the stock market for you.

if your husband had shared the financial efforts rather than leaving it to the immediately post-partum person perhaps it wouldn't have happened. You are supposedly a team and half the responsibility is his.

If you need the money, sell them now. A £2k loan is not much in the scheme of house-buying things.

It can be worth having an automatic instruction to a broker to sell shares when they reach particular points (high or low). Anyway it's done now. BP has had a lot of problems. I bought for my pension when it was at its lowest and am still doing well on that but it is certainly down below the peak of this year. It might go up but it might also drop further. If you are going to need the money for a property very soon it is probably going to better to sell it now and try to drum up the extra money for the flat from elsewhere rather than take the risk the shares will rise.

You weren't wrong not to sell. It is hard to predict. Arguably BP may well rise further but they have been dogged by problems recently so who knows. My other great share tip is Tesco... laughing as I type - also chosen by me in my pension and dropping like a stone. Just as well I'll never retire.