Your house. It holds your precious personal possessions and memories of holiday gatherings, get-togethers with friends, and time spent with your family. It’s your home, your castle, your refuge.
Until the time comes to sell it. Then it becomes a piece of property on the market. Once you put something up for sale, it doesn’t belong to you any more. It’s a commodity in the public marketplace. At least that is the financially healthy way to see it.
One of the most challenging aspects of selling a home is letting go emotionally of your attachment to it. Back when I was selling real estate, I saw scores of deals collapse, not because buyers and sellers couldn’t agree on the purchase price, but because both of them wanted a fixture such as a painting on the wall or a chandelier. As a financial planner, I also have seen bitter battles in divorce settlements over personal property that has little financial value but huge emotional value.
It is a challenge to let go of any emotionally charged possessions. It isn’t easy to see items you remember from childhood picked over by the public at an estate sale of your parents’ possessions. It’s hard to have a garage sale because a divorce has forced you to sell your house and move.
Being unable to let go of a house or any other important possession makes it hard to set a reasonable selling price according to its market value rather than its emotional value. Just because you rocked your babies to sleep in it, a particular rocking chair isn’t inherently a valuable antique. Its worth to potential buyers may be far lower than the emotional worth it has for you.
Of course, the same concept can lead to pricing something too low. A divorcing couple, for example, may just want to get rid of an item and the emotional pain attached to it.
Before you sell anything that has an emotional attachment, it’s helpful to acknowledge that giving up this possession is painful. It’s helpful to say goodbye to it in your own way. It’s also helpful to understand that the emotional value of a physical object can be separated from the object itself. What makes most of these possessions so important are the memories we have attached to them.
A few years ago the parents of one of my clients retired and sold the farm that had been in the family for three generations. Before the sale, my client took photographs of the home place. She said, “It was a shock when I saw the pictures. They didn’t look anything like the way I saw the farm. I realized what I was seeing wasn’t the place as it looked then, but the place as I remembered it when I was growing up.”
That realization helped her let go of the farm and become comfortable with the need to sell it. Her memories, attached as they were to the past instead of the present, belonged to her and not to the land. They didn’t disappear when the land was sold.
One suggestion to help you let go of a home or other important possession is to realize that its emotional value doesn’t end when you sell it. Through your memories, you get to keep most of the value the object has had for you. At the same time, you pass on the potential of a high emotional value to the next owners who, with time and use, will almost certainly develop attachments of their own. For both of you, the sale can be an emotionally winning transaction.
