The economics of inconvenience

Quick update on the house situation: we put in an offer on another house and it that offer was accepted. We have the signed contract, we're scheduling the home inspections and, based on the age of the house, it looks like everything is done correctly and with the proper permits. And we don't think these homeowners lied. So, for now, our impending homelessness has been avoided. That's good news.

However.

We have been so inconvenienced throughout this whole process that it makes me a little sick. Now, please don't misunderstand. The home buying/home selling process is the basic definition of inconvience. Having to keep your house in “show ready” condition all the time is pretty much impossible when you live with a slob, a child and 2 dogs (or whatever the composition of your house may be. Also, I will say that some people have a very lax definition of “show ready”. Many of the houses we looked at were a wreck) so you have to do regular deep cleaning daily. Being called at random times saying potential buyers want to look at your house in the next hour or two is annoying. Living your life at the mercy of your realtor's ability to answer a phone sucks. Driving all over the place, losing numerous evenings and weekends, negotiating contracts, and going out to eat so many times you don't even want to set foot in a restaurant (because you fail to anticipate just how long things take so you don't bring food or snacks) are monster pains in the ass.

But that's expected. Most of it, anyway.

What's not expected is going through all of that and then having to go through all of it again. I haven't put a specific number or dollar figure on how much our inconvenience has cost us but I do know that, as a result of this, we've overspent our budget in a number of categories:

• Gas. We're moving about 30 minutes south of where we currently live. So every time we had to drive down there, it costs us more money in gas. We have fairly fuel efficient cars but the extra trips definitely add up. At least we can drive in a way that avoids tolls. That's a bonus.
• A second home inspection. We had money for one. That's it. There's no guarantee we'll get the money we already laid it in a timely fashion so we now have to pay out of pocket. Again. We only have a finite amount of money in savings and because of this nonsense, it's dwindling at an alarmingly rapid pace. And I don't know what it's like in your house, but our money gets spent a lot faster than it gets saved.
• Time. Okay, this is a bit more difficult to quantify in terms of dollars but, if you ignore how much of our free time has been eaten up, my husband has had to take way more time off from work than he had planned. Like our savings, he only has a finite amount of time off, and we already had to cancel our family vacation. Now we don't even think we can reschedule at any point this year. As for me, I don't have an office job but I am trying to run a mentoring program and do some freelancing. Losing this time is time I've lost to work on both.
• My child's school. Because we do not currently live at our new address. I have to go through the school choice process in order to enroll my daughter in her assigned school. And the district we are moving into is a gigantic pain in the ass about school choice (how their district rules supersede state law confuses me but whatever). Last week, I drove down to the office to hand in our paperwork. Now I have to call the office, explain what happened, drive down there again to drop off revised paperwork, and let the new school know what's going on. And if choice falls through, the child will have to miss the entire first week of school due to the registration process. At least the school supply list is online.

Given everything, I understand that the situation could be way, way worse. We could have zero dollars in savings. We could have no money in the budget available for extra gas. We could have no time off work or even have found a new house right away. We could have to pay a hotel or temporary apartment if the new sellers didn't agree to our settlement date. We could be back in debt.

So I appreciate the fact that all of this is just an inconvenience. But I never expected an inconvenience to be so damn expensive.