This week I engaged a realtor to help sell my apartment in Brooklyn. It goes against many of the principles behind Saverocity since their fee is going to take a chunk of my profit, and there are services out there now like For Sale By Owner that would reduce costs drastically. In fact, I could list on the MLS website for under $750 and possibly sell, VS the 5.5% (after a small negotiation) fee that I will be paying for the sale of this place.
The thing is though, sometimes, you just need to let go of a lot of the theory, and best practices, and offload things that are too much to handle, if you don’t you will be overloaded and your ability to actually implement ideas and processes that are better in theory is diminished, procrastination and stress set in and you get nothing done. There are times when ‘good enough’ is better than perfect.
Right now we have quite a lot on our plates, with jobs, college, the site, the baby due in June, crappy commutes since our car is snowed in still, and taking on more, such as managing the sale of a home ourselves struck us as too much to handle effectively, so we agreed to offload this process to the pros and focus our attention on other things. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining, nor looking for sympathy. Life is absolutely wonderful right now, and I wouldn’t change a thing, I am just recognizing that I am busy as all hell!
On a similar note I chatted recently with someone explaining how I had gone from a mindset of opening up multiple amazon payment accounts, to still having just 4, and sometimes forgetting that I should use them until right at the end of the month, we discussed other things like this and both of us just drop things if the rest of our lives are too hectic.
So, whilst it is critical to make the offloading decisions carefully, and not too quickly, there are times when the value of clearing the mind and freeing up time for production outweighs the theoretical savings of doing things in the most efficient manner possible. Psychologically it hits a ‘reset button’ on your planning processes and allows you clarity again.
I have long been a proponent of the concept of Ichigo Ichie as explained in my post Contrarianism and in order to be positioned properly to take advantage of every opportunity you cannot be stifled with too many things on your plate, there are times when you just need to pass them off to someone else, pay a fee for it and get on being productive, despite how that might ‘sting’ from a theory perspective, in practice it will get you more progress than fussing over the pennies.
Everyone has their own capacity. In martial arts philosophy in Japan our Grandmaster would discuss the concept of Sai No Utsuwa, which would explore a persons ability to progress by concepts (loosely speaking) of heart, talent and capacity. Sometimes capacity can be impeded by too much noise, and without that capacity, the most talented person cannot improve. Ironically, my wife and I have joked about our experiences in College as adults, looking at the ‘kids’ that attend our classes. Both her Masters and my CFP class have a smattering of people who have never been in the workforce, nor balanced a budget, and are crying out that their Capacity is also overloaded.
Perhaps we too appear like that to people 10 years our elder, in fact more accurately we probably appear like that to anyone who is already a parent, since we do have it easy there for now, but I think we have a pretty good grasp of how to get things done, having said that, I am sure those college kids think they do too….
Well done on getting the sale going. Brooklyn real estate has appreciated crazily recently, I’d say it’s a good time to sell.
FSBO is a false saving in almost every market. In any business traditionally driven by commission based sales you can never get the kind of exposure you need without paying for it. That goes for houses, cars, life insurance, mutual funds, credit cards. The ones that use commission driven sales forces demand better prices. You “save” maybe 2-3% commission but I bet you get 5% or more less for your asset.
Thanks mate, still a process to get the place tip top ready for listing, but an object in motion and all that…
Honestly, I might try fsbo again, if we had more of a timing luxury, but for now I think it’s worth the fee. Already they are suggesting pricing it above where we were going and with better strategy so they have provided value.
Good for you! We are “pros” at putting values on things like trips, hotel rooms and bottles of wine, but our sanity matters too! We can’t DIY everything.
We’ve sold three homes so far, and two were by owner sales. With the first house sale, we had the luxury of time. The second time, we were building another house and really needed to be sure our current house would sell quickly. And the third time, we knew our house would be “hot.” An ad on Craigslist generated a buyer and a list of 18 people ready to step in if the sale fell through. The timing was perfect and the sale was easy. Three different properties, three different markets, three different time constraints. There is no one size fits all for things like home sales.
Sounds like you’ve already seen value from your decision, so let yourself off the hook. It’s a good plan!
Wow- 18 from just craigslist is a lot of interest and a lot of savings! I agree it’s about timing and we may try again when the pressure is off a little..