I’m not going to cry. I let it all go this month. Our net worth decreased. Our debt payoff percentage backslid. I didn’t post a single time this month to the blog. Marketing our townhouse for sale took a back seat to the increasing chaos for me at work. I freely spent hundreds of dollars on Christmas presents at Veteran’s Day and Black Friday sales (but I was saving money!). And I actively chose to *NOT* pay off all of the credit cards in full (we need cash to pay bills next month!).

Let’s go straight to the graph. Talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic: Risky financial moves.

Month 2 FSBO:

1. I made some personal connections.

Although I didn’t push as hard as I had hoped to get the townhouse sold, I did manage to call about twenty five local realtors this month to ask them if they knew of any buyers searching for a townhome and to keep ours in mind. Many of these agents reverse-pitched to be our listing agent, but I want to give it a good FSBO try.  We weren’t really impressed by our last two agents for different reasons.

2. I made some changes online.

Online, I reduced the price of the townhouse by $100.00 to trigger any auto-emails to people who might have saved our townhouse to their favorites.  Then at mid-month, I took it clean off the market on Zillow.com. I know this is counter-intuitive, but it was showing we had been on the market over 500 days. That might frighten a buyer, so we’ll sit back, enjoy the holidays, and re-list after the first of the year.

3. I went “old school.”

I sent several more postcards to realtors to reinforce our offer to pay the buyer’s agent commission on a sale. A couple of them called me back to express their delight in the novelty of receiving a postcard from a seller. I’m still laughing at the one who told me I’d missed my calling in Real Estate. While I was flattered, real-estate-world is cutthroat and unpredictable, not really my bag.

4. I pulled a rabbit out of my hat.

Now, there’s something that hasn’t been included in this chart that should have been here all along. But since we weren’t making payments on it and I haven’t visited the land in over a year, and maybe I’m just lazy and didn’t want to redo the chart, it hasn’t been listed in here. We own eight and a half acres in a rural town, about half a mile from where I work. Originally, we had intentions of building a home on it, and our chickens and goats lived there until we bought Burton Farm. It has been for sale by owner for a year and a half, but we finally secured a contract two days ago with a cash buyer. We will be closing on the sale of it in two days (fingers crossed). This is going to be life-changing and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

See you next month.

Erica

If you want to follow along with the story of the sale of our townhouse, you can click here.

If you want to go back to the beginning of our debt payoff story, you can click here.