Apologies for the length of this.
I am driving myself completely crazy thinking about the ?what ifs? on my recent sale- can somebody please talk some sense into me? I should start by saying I am a bit ashamed to even tell anyone I am upset about this, since I know I should thank my lucky stars when so many people are struggling to sell elsewhere.
We are currently living in a part of Scotland where property prices are showing resilience- our area is quite popular.
We swithered for months about whether to sell my house and do a big move to the country. For reasons I won?t bore you with, we ended up getting a Home Report on the house well before actually going on the market. The HR valuation came back at the exactly the price I paid for it five years ago. The surveyor seemed a bit snippy about our period property generally, including some stuff that we think adds character (apparently the stripped wood flooring is ?uneven? in places, that sort of thing). This dented my confidence a bit- not about selling but about what we could reasonably expect by way of price. It did seem to us that at that valuation, my house was going to be something of a bargain compared to others in the area of comparable size- but hey ho.
While all of this was going on, my absolute dream house popped up on the market. I have been in love with this house (from the outside) for about 10 years and suddenly there it was, within our grasp. But we had to move quickly. In an act which would normally be considered insane in this market, we went ahead and offered on it- without having sold and indeed without even quite being on the market yet. The owner accepted our offer for various reasons but made it clear that we would need to conclude missives (exchange) quickly.
We rushed my house on to the market (great fun while working full time with two small children creating a constant bombsite in their wake).
And then I totally, totally panicked. All I could think of, over and over again, was that we could be financially ruined and have absolutely no way to pay for the house we were committed to buying. I knew, rationally we had plenty of time to sell and I knew we would but?then we held an open viewing and NOBODY came. This put me into an even further tailspin- to the point I was lying in bed at night having chest pains.
Then all of a sudden interest picked up- a LOT. To cut a long story short, despite agents urging otherwise, I accepted the first decent enough offer I received (at the valuation price), despite every indication being that there was considerable further interest and it could have easily gone to a closing date. The property market seems to continue to enjoy an upturn here and that has not changed.
I know I should only be grateful- I sold the house, got a reasonable enough price and it will enable us to go forward to buy the dream house. All good, right? But I feel increasingly miserable about it. I cannot stop constantly kicking myself. Had we gone to a closing date, it seems pretty clear we could have reasonably expected at least £5,000 or even more, money which would have cushioned the blow a bit of paying over the odds for the dream house. I look around my lovely house and want to cry. I feel like I gave it away.
What the hell is wrong with me? I keep telling myself to get over it, move on, forget about it- none of which is working.