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1. Before you get started, write out your vision of the life you want to live after you close the deal. It’s easy to get distracted once you’re in the weeds of the actual transaction, losing sight of what’s really important to you - what motivated you to start the process in the first place. So, before you get started, put pen to paper and write out exactly what sort of lifestyle you are trying to create - financially and otherwise - by taking this path. Make sure you include your wants, needs, deal-makers and deal-breakers.
2. Ask yourself: how does this decision make you feel? We tend to approach real estate decisions from a place of reason and logic, but sometimes that means we can reason our way right into agreeing to something because it’s easier than sorting out our differences with our mate. So, before you make a decision, weigh your alternatives and see how they make you feel. Does the idea of living in this home, even though it’s a fixer beyond anything you expected to buy, make you feel peaceful, expansive or secure? Does the idea of living in the gated community of your wife’s dreams make you feel constricted, anxious or burdened?
3. Recognize hypotheticals as hallucinations. Hypotheticals, by definition, are the opposite of what is real. So living in a hypothetical world of how much you probably could have gotten the place for, or how much more you might have been able to squeeze out of the buyer if you’d bargained harder after the deal has been done is nothing but fantasy and crazy-making, all wrapped up in an efficient little depressing package. Even more crazy-making: wondering what you could have offered for that house that would have beaten the other 20 offers. If you are a buyer who has repeatedly been outbid, the wiser practice is to ask your agent to go back and pull the actual sale prices of the homes you lost after they close escrow, to give yourself a good reality check and leverage the experience to help you have a smarter, more successful house hunt going forward.
4. Sit still before you start the demolition and remodel. One of the most common forms of remorse I’ve seen is the remorse homeowners have when they start remodeling a place too soon. The best practice is to live in a place for a few months first, observing patterns in the natural light, traffic, noise and even how your family uses the various areas of space in the home before you start tearing walls down and turning windows into french doors.
5. Do your own numbers first. Homeowners who have remorse about getting in over their heads, financially, often end up in that spot because they took someone else’s word about what they could afford, rather than running their own household financials first, then telling their professionals what their maximum spend would be, monthly and otherwise. Make sure you go into the home buying process clear on what is a sustainable range of monthly housing costs for you and your family based on the total picture of your income and expenses (including your future plans and expenses banks don’t consider, like private school tuition, travel, etc.), rather than expecting someone else to figure this out for you.
6. Get systematic about your options for resolving the remorse. If you find yourself in a position where you’re experiencing deep remorse for having bought a particular home, it’s time to stop wallowing and start acting to improve your experience in the home. Systematically list the things that make you crazy about the place. So, make a list of the things that are causing you remorse, then get clear on all your options - and don’t limit your thinking about what those options might be. Maybe you need to plan out the fixes you need, and budget for them, for the next few years out, and start tackling one every month. I love my home and my neighborhood, but was driven to distraction for months by the fact that I could hear the subway at night. I’d already installed dual paned windows! My sanity and sleep have been saved by the investment of $10 every couple of months in - you guessed it - earplugs from the drug store.
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