Where do we go from here? When does the end appear? When do the trumpets cheer?

Some days I'm not sure what we're doing, or why we're doing it, at least with regard to attempting to sell our current house and buy the one we like. Today is definitely one of those days.

To finish everything that we feel is necessary, we need just slightly more money than we currently have available. Part of it is, of course, that it's the wrong time of the year. We had Thanksgiving groceries to purchase, and have Christmas gifts still to buy. There's never a lot of extra money around the holidays. Of course, there's also a certain amount of reluctance to spend too terribly much money on a house that we'll be leaving. We're trying to focus our purchases on things that can leave with us, now, but there are still a few things that must be done to the physical house.

We met with a realtor about selling our house (our other realtor is a buyers' agent only) on Tuesday. He had brought some comparables but after seeing the house decided to pull new comparables. We got those listings this morning. Based on those listings, I don't think any of them are exactly comparable, but he seems to feel that they are. Worse, he thinks we should list it at a price that's about $20K less than what we hoped to get for the house. Now, I know that I don't have a lot of experience in real estate, but even looking at the same houses that he feels are comparable, I expected a suggestion about $10K more than what he did suggest.

And buying the new house is dependent in large part on the selling price for this house. We'll be using what we have after closing costs and paying the mortgage to make what we hoped would be a substantial down payment, thereby reducing our monthly mortgage. If we list at his suggested price, even if we sell quickly, we won't make enough to buy the new house and still live month to month. This is obviously not a good option.

I can't help but feel like it's my fault. If I had been less impatient, we could have finished staging the house before a realtor ever saw it, just like one of my staging books suggested. If I had just been feeling less down this past week, I could have started on the prepacking, and it would have looked less cluttered. If I had just done something different, I could change what price he suggests for listing.

Of course, it's not a binding suggestion. There are smaller homes in the vicinity listed for more, and frankly, that would be a red flag to me as a buyer. Why, I'd wonder, is the larger house listed for less than the smaller one? I'd suspect there's something that's being hidden, or that the owners were really desperate to sell, and would accept really low offers. Neither of these things are the image I want to project.

So today's a day to ponder, I suppose. I already felt mentally assaulted this week for various reasons - this is just one more! I feel so overwhelmed and I don't know where to start, so instead I just watch television and read the internet. Not the best coping skills, I know, but I feel so overwhelmed and so out at sea that I don't know where to go.