Monthly Update #56 (April 2023) – The Offer(s) – Total Balance – Go Health Pro

Hello everyone! It’s that time of the month again

As you can probably read from the headline it has been an exciting month in the Total Balance household.

The excitement definitely doesn’t come from looking at our portfolio! It has yet AGAIN managed to produce a negative growth this month. – But lets not dwell too much on that part today (we’ll just get bummed out!).

What’s up with “The offers”?!

Well, as you’ll probably know if you’re a regular follower, we’ve put our primary home up for sale.

From the December 2022 update:

Our current home is not really “FIRE-friendly” and it is a little far from our daughters school. We’d like for her to be able to walk or bike home from school by herself (she is 8). A lot of her classmates live close to the school, and most of them are able to walk home from school by themselves (or visit their classmates). When our daughter has a playdate we have to drive her, and while we knew this when we moved in (she had not started school when we moved), it has started to wear on her parents  I hate “wasting time on the road”.

So those are the two primary reasons; The cost of ownership and the cost of distance from our daughters school

But Nick, are you crazy? Selling your home in the worst drawdown since 2009!?

That’s what I said! (to my wife). She remain optimistic that we’ll be able to find a buyer. I remain (very) pessimistic…

It turned out that (yet again) my wife had the upper hand here. Apparently there was no reason to be pessimistic. We’ve had showings every weekend since we started advertising the house, and 30 days after we went online we received an offer. The offer was 7% below our asking price. In the current market, I don’t think it was a bad first offer. We didn’t accept it (of course), but started negotiating a price that we could both live with. It went on for a few weeks (WAY too long if you ask me). We never agreed on a final price – before we suddenly received another offer from another buyer. This buyer had viewed the property for the first time on Sunday and the offer came in on Monday. It was 5% below our asking price. We negotiated for 1 day and ended up giving them a 3% discount on our asking price – and signed the deal on Wednesday. BOOOM!

Done deal. – It’s moving time! Up until this point I’ve had a mental block in my head about that part of the journey. I just couldn’t imagine the house selling that fast, and I did not want to worry in advance over having to move all our crap to a new location HAHA! Oh well, I guess it’s now time to open up that can of worms…

Technically the finale sale of our home happened in May, so I will keep the details for the next update! *suspenseful music*.

I’ve grown tired and a little numb frankly, reporting about our portfolios lack of performance, so I will just add that nothing noteworthy in terms of our investments happened this month!

We did however manage to break another savings record, and saved €2.666 this month. The coming months will likely see 0 savings, as we’re gonna need to pad our “new home construction fund” significantly. More on this in the next update!

As always I include the Classic Growth Charts for tracking purpose

Since we now know the sales price of our current home, we also know our exact equity. I will update the graph with the exact numbers once the move is completed (the money actually takes months to arrive –  even after you’ve moved out! – Meanwhile the banks are making killer money on this delay).

You won’t believe it! We sold our home. Perhaps too cheaply?…We’ll know in a few years time

It’s moving time! The coming months will thus see limited savings, as we’ll need the funds for various constructions in our new home. More in this in the coming updates

We managed to tuck away a whopping €2.666 month, which was great since our portfolio managed to lose about €1.100! Will it ever end?!

Anyway, see you next month for the exciting reveal of our next home!