I’ve never lost so much money before. NEVER. And I don’t fancy loosing so much money never again. When that is said – this is the story about I lost more than $100.000 but ended up with a smile on my face.
It all began when we bought a house
We originally lived in an old small house in a Copenhagen (that’s Denmark folks 
) suburb. Though it was a nice house, it was originally bought back when I was single and wanted a bigger place that I could have my music studio in.
The house was pretty old (from 1930 I think) and it needed a loving in a few places. And since I’m really not that handy (well not handy at all) we sold it and started looking for something new.
Because we came from an old house – we were looking for a new house and we found one in another Copenhagen suburb. The house was just built (not a year old at the time).
This was back in late 2008. The property market had already started to decline but as time would tell – it would go down for several years to come.
To keep the story short what basically happended was that I got a daughter and we decided that we wanted to live somewhere else and we had to sell our house in the absolute worst market in years.
In this process, we had to sell our house for more than $100.000 less than we’d paid for it just a couple of years before.
But to cut to the chase this is not a story about losing money on selling your home. It’s about how you think about money.
DISCLAIMER: It’s important to point out that I’ve actually earned money on all past property sales. You win some and you loose some.
Accepting the loss
First when we got the low offer I was both sad and angry, not so much on the market or people who’d made the offer, but most of all on myself. Why the f… did I not see this coming? Why had I paid so much for a house that had lost so much of it’s value so fast? At first I didn’t want to accept their offer, not at this price, and had the made the same offer just after we had put the house up for sale, I would surely have declined it. But here we were a year after we had first put the house up for sale, and we really just wanted to move on.
So in the beginning I had all these negative feelings but we signed the papers anyway.
Programming your mind
I’m not quite sure when it hit me. Maybe it was seeing the joy in my girlfriends eyes after we’ve signed the papers or maybe it was realizing that there are far bigger issues in the world than loosing a little paper money selling your house.
But at some point I simply decided that I wouldn’t have anymore negative feelings about this. The deed was done, the house was sold. How was negative feelings ever going to help me?
So I started thinking about all the positive aspects of the sale. And as I added more positive thoughts to the whole situation, the less space the negative had and the money seemed more and more irrelevant.
In the end… it’s only money, I can always earn it again. Did it hurt in the moment? Yes absolutely, but I will not spend time punishing myself or feeling bad.
So if you have a problem that might seem like a really big issue, try to focus on all the good things that can or will come from the situation. The more positive thoughts you associate with it, the less space the negative thoughts will have, and the less of a problem it will seem to you. You will also be in a more positive flow which will follow you in everything you do.
Don’t swallow in negative emotions, cry if you have to (even if you’re a big boy), get over it and go out and kick some ass.
We’ve moved on to a new place that suits our needs better, so lately it’s been all about moving which is also why I haven’t blogged so much lately (you know boxes everywhere…). Hopefully that will change
credit: Jim Larson
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You’re definitely right that there’s not much benefit to being low over losing money. However, I think there are two really important aspects to think about regarding money and buying/selling a house.
1. If you sell your house for 20% less than you bought it and buy another house, at similar cost, that’s been affected by the market in the same way you haven’t really lost any money. The same goes if you sell at a 20% “profit” and buy another, similar house.
2. Work to avoid losses when you sell your house. A house is a big, often leveraged (you have loads of loans), investment and 10% makes a huge difference. If 10% extra equals $10.000, then you should work really hard to get that extra 10%. Think about how hard you normally work to earn $10.000
People around me often say “that’s just 5% less than I wanted. I still make a huge deal, I don’t care care anymore”. I find that to be a huge mistake.
Hey Robert
. Also the house didn’t quite have the “right location” so that made it even more difficult to sell.
You’re spot on. The problem was that we bought back in 2008 when the market was already going down. So we actually thought we made a good deal
When that is said, I don’t want to sweat over money. I do not miss anything in my life so I prefer to see positive on it. One positive thing is that I could share my story on my blog and perhaps help someone else who’s been weighed down by a problem
Hello Rasmus, nice experience there hahahah I think I would be mad as well in the begining, it’s hard to accept the lost, most of the time I think that negative emotions are truly bad, but in some cases (really few cases) negative emotions can help you to achieve great things.
For example, Richard Bandler co-creator of Neuro Linguistic Programming helped people with smoking problems to stop smoking by actually enhancing their negative emotions towards smoking, or in the reality show the Biggest Loser they teach people to truly hate their actual lifestyle so that way the can work harder towards a better lifestyle.
In my personal case, what made me start learning about business and made me start taking action was realizing that the cubicle lifestyle was not leading me anywhere and that made me sick, I didn’t wanted to keep on this life (and because I knew about this I made myself feel even worse), so I began, although I admit that for some weeks it truly made me feel miserable because I wanted another kind of life righ now, but because it was not the first time I did this I was able to control it later and calm myself.
Although I don’t recommend it, in some extreme cases where you truly want to achieve something but you fail because of commitment you can use it as fuel, but if you don’t control it, it can be very dangerous
Hey Rodrigo
Thanks for sharing your story, I’m totally with you when it comes to change most often requires pain first (also I’m currently reading Tony Robbins – don’t know why I put ot off for so long – and he’s also all about feeling the pain in order to make the change)
. And by the way, I’m beginning an NLP course this January so hopefully I’ll get even better at modelling success and communicate better.
I guess that developing myself (through things such as a NLP course) is one of those things you can do more easily when you do not have a 9-5 job but have more control over your own time and money.
NLP is a great tool to change habits, I made an audio course that is called “The Collection of Confidence” by Hypnotica (2 years ago I was pretty nerdy and insecure), it’s a series of audios and before listening to every audio you have to do a challenge, the first one was to write what you wanted to be in a list and read it every night before sleeping and every morning as soon as you wake up.
My first Book was Introducing to NLP from Joseph o’Connor & John Seymour, it’s a really good book