She turned down the only offer on her house. Here's what I told her.
A reader writes
I love our house. I picked it. I pushed for it. And I've been the one doing everything to sell it — staging it, coordinating with the agent, keeping it show-ready while still living in it with two kids. My husband barely looks at the listing updates. It doesn't seem to bother him at all, which honestly makes me more stressed.
Five weeks on the market. One offer — $40,000 below our asking price, which was already lower than what we paid. I rejected it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if that was the right call, or if I'm holding out for a number that isn't coming. Open houses feel thin. Marketing feels thin. And every week that passes, we're still paying the mortgage.
Did I make a terrible mistake?
Here's something I want you to notice about how you told that story.
You mentioned the house seven times before you mentioned the money once.
That's not an accident. That's data.
The house you're trying to sell is not, in your mind, just an asset. It's the decision you made. It's the place you chose. When you say I picked it, I pushed for it — you're also saying the outcome of this sale is a verdict on your judgment. That's a heavy thing to carry.
Your husband isn't unbothered because he's smarter or colder. He's unbothered because it wasn't his call. And that gap matters — not just emotionally, but financially. Psychologist Barry Staw found that the person who made the original decision is more likely to hold on longer and risk a worse outcome, just to avoid facing that the decision didn't work out. You picked this house. That's why this offer feels like a verdict. That's why $40,000 feels like so much more than money.
The $40,000 gap between that offer and your asking price? The purchase price you paid when you bought? Neither of those has anything to do with what your house is worth today. One is a number you want. The other is history.
Economists call this the sunk cost fallacy. What you paid is gone, whether you sell today or hold for another year. David Genesove and Christopher Mayer studied the Boston housing market through the 1990s bust and found exactly this: sellers facing a loss set asking prices well above what the market supported — and the more they'd paid, the more they overpriced. They stayed on the market far longer. Owner-occupants showed twice the effect of professional investors.
None of this means the original decision was a mistake.
When you bought, you had good reasons. You read the situation correctly at the time. What changed is the market — and that's not a failure of judgment. That's just what risk means. Some things are by chance.
Before you decide anything, write one sentence: "It's November 2026, the market never warmed up, and I'm still trying to sell this house." Now keep writing. What does the rest of that look like? How many months of mortgage? What did waiting cost you — in money and in life? Gary Klein, who developed this exercise, found it surfaces 30% more problems than asking "will it work out?" — because we reason more clearly about the past than the future, even an imagined one. Five minutes. Just write it.
When you write it out, one number usually stands out: what you're spending every month to hold versus what that capital could earn somewhere else. That's the real comparison. Everything else is history.
Have a money question of your own? Send it in. I read every one, and questions are anonymized before they're published.