There it was, the eternal ‘which comes first’ conundrum, played out in real time in front of our eyes, here in Ma’ale Adumim, the sleepy little town we call home. For us, the question was which do we work on first, buying or selling, having to do with my least favorite topic, real estate. My position, which I maintained made a good deal of sense – at least it did when I was planting my toes firmly on the ground – was there was no point in putting our apartment on the market unless we had reason to believe there would be some place out there that we would reasonably want to move into. Yes, we could always back out of any deal we agreed to – something that Esther, our real estate agent kept reaffirming – but short of some unexpected ‘unforeseen,’ that wasn’t what my mommy and daddy raised me to do.

The two ladies involved in this matter on our end, Barbara and our agent, had the opposite point of view. If we were interested in moving, something my wife was adamant about (there seemed to be more steps up and down in our apartment every day), then we needed to get with the program and put our apartment officially on the market. It wasn’t clear that we could afford to buy THE apartment on Hashofar, but one thing we were NOT going to do was sign a you-can’t-back-out contract with the folks who owned the project unless we were sure we could come up with the big bucks required within the six months they were insisting on. And so the signs went up, FOR SALE, one hanging from the merpeset off our dining room and one similarly dangling from the merpeset off of ‘Natania’s room’ – a day of finality, as far as I was concerned.

Many people here and elsewhere have been in this situation and survived, which doesn’t make the task any more enviable, especially if you are down-sizing. But the I-gotta-get-rid-of-a-lot-of-stuff part of it will come later. (Trust me, it will!) The first kind of baggage one needs to deal with is kind that resides in the head. There’s almost always the OMG, WHAT ARE WE DOING!!! aspect of things. As in, at this moment in time, I don’t have to think about where I’m living, I know where I am and what’s around me; I know where my stuff is, what drawer, what shelf, what cabinet to look in. I can focus my full attention on what’s most important, like what’s for dinner or what cocktails should I be considering for kiddush next Shabbat. Or I can find creative ways of tuning out all the insanity around me, which is not easy, considering all that is going on in the world. Now I’m being asked to break out of my cocoon and tune into the uncertainty that is all around me. Don’t I already have enough to keep me awake at night?

(Barbara’s phone rings. Hi, Esther. You have someone who wants to look at our apartment? Quick, Fred, we have to straighten up the living room. Pick up all the cat toys that are lying around. I’ll do a quick swish of the kitchen floor.) Although, quite frankly, the first few weeks the apartment was on the market, the prospective buyers were few and far between. As far as we knew, THE apartment was still available. According to Asaf, our man on the spot, someone else had come and seen the place, offering cold cash – provided the stony-faced agents for the construction company would lower the price a tad – all to no avail. Not one agora less! One of our friends had suggested (and we got lots of suggestions, some solicited, some not, some useful, some not, all well-meaning) that we get a professional to do the negotiations on our behalf, one who knows what is and is not possible, one who can talk turkey to these buzzards. But if cold cash wouldn’t do it, I can’t imagine what verbal prestidigitation any negotiator could employ on our behalf.

(Sit and wait, or, in other words, there will be plenty of time to fret later on, so for now, just chill. Nothing’s happening; nobody’s going anywhere. No buyers for our apartment, no buyers for THE apartment. [Some folks, to show off their vocabulary, would invoke the term ‘stasis.’ Well, there’s that.])

However, while there was no point in getting help in trying to negotiate the price of THE apartment down to a more user-friendly number, we figured we could use some assistance in wading through the money matters on our end. We needed to turn days, weeks, months, and years of data available from credit card and bank statements, spreadsheets, and numbers placed carefully on yellow pads into something coherent and usable. Can we afford THE apartment, yes or no? There was a suggestion that we contact a financial planner and were even given two names, one of whom Barbara contacted.

We spent something like an hour on a Zoom call with this fellow, after which I remarked, ‘That was a total waste of time.’ No surprise, someone disagreed. ‘He confirmed what I was thinking.’ No dear, there is a difference between agreeing with what you told him and confirming that you are right. We should have given him all our financial information (actual numbers rather than estimates) and let him decide if what we are planning makes sense or not. Barbara was horrified by my suggestion. ‘I’m not going to give all our financial information to a stranger!’ Then how can he help us?

Towards the end of the Zoom call, I felt compelled (compelled!) to involve myself in the discussion. Even if we figure out that we CAN buy THE apartment, is it PRUDENT for us to do so? For example, is it a good idea, at our age, to extend our mortgage? (See explanation below.) I used this question as an example of how a financial planner might benefit us. There are lots of things one can do that one might regret doing down the road. What happens when only one of you is around? What happens if the dollar starts to sink big time? What happens……?

Things to think about. We need to do more than crunch the numbers; maybe put them through my new Baratza ESP coffee grinder. We might at least get a better brew ratio.

(EXPLANATION: Unlike in The States, where every time you buy or sell a property you wind up with a new mortgage, here in The Land, the same mortgage goes with you until you pay it off. If you need additional funds to buy a new place or to do renovations on where you are, you can extend the mortgage, paying the same monthly amount but for a longer period of time. Right now, we have a little more than five years remaining on our twenty-year mortgage with Bank Leumi, but we can add on three more years. This arrangement made perfect sense for some younger friends, enabling them to borrow money to do renovations to their apartment. But for us, aren’t we better off paying off our mortgage as soon as we can, freeing almost 4,000NIS every month to do other things?)