You win some and you lose some. If you didn't bid so aggressively, chances are you'd not have gotten the house, and who's to tell that you could have gotten the 8k+ house? Then you'd never have gotten into this neighborhood that you said you like.

Look, a lot of people overpaid for their houses. Think about all the poor folks buying houses leading up to the 2008 crash. People actually lost their life's savings and then some. What you overpaid is really nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Change your frame of mind thusly: you didn't overpay for your house; your neighbor got extremely luckly getting a better house. Most people don't have that kind of luck, and it's just a fact of life. Move on and enjoy your life in this location.

OP. did your agent tell you to bid over the asking price?

I agree with PPs who suggest you get some help with anxiety. The amounts you’re discussing (+/- 10k) are also small beans relative to the likely price of the house. You realize that house prices aren’t set by a hedonic model right? There is a lot of room for variation based on market conditions, idiosyncratic preferences, etc.

From personal experience, I also thought we might have overpaid for our house...about $15k but my DH convinced me we might not have gotten the house if we bid less...plus we’d been looking and bidding for 2 years! And we just sold the house for more than we asked or expected

Whenever there is a seller's market, everyone feels like they overpaid. In my neighborhood, a lot of people bought in the housing bubble of 2005 and houses are now selling for like $100k less. Nothing you can do. Enjoy your house while you live in it. Try to pay off enough of your mortgage so that you are not upside down when you try to sell. And, like at least one PP said, this is not about having overpaid. It's about anxiety and your perseverating on the house.

A cautionary tale OP: we withdrew from a contract under appraisal contingency a couple weeks ago because it came in 10% under the contract price, in an area where this is not common. 10% was a lot of money for us, both in terms of making up the difference for the loan and the risk of losing money if we lose our jobs, have to move, and can't sell that high. But for now, our lease is running out in a month, and not a single house has been listed in 2 weeks that we even want to see. We're looking for a rental now because another pandemic year in a small apartment with shared laundry and no private outdoor space is not an option, but pickings are slim.

Wow. Seriously? This mindset will make you lose more money down the road. You can’t always get even in life. Move on.

It sounds like you aren’t happy with your house, less because of the price and more because you are comparing it to other houses around you.

The amounts you are talking about, over a 30 year mortgage, are just not worth thinking about. As said by previous PPs, it seems like there might be something else behind the fixation. Are things really tight right now? Focus on what you do like about your house and your life more generally, make a few fixes around the house if you have the money, and if you can’t make the house work for you, move. But give up worrying about the $10 or $20k you think you overpaid. You probably didn’t and it’s behind you now.

We bought last year too and paid above asking, it was tough at the time but I didn’t feel like we overpaid. It was a multiple offer situation. I would have gone higher than what we paid if I had to. My point is, anyone looking at my house as a comp thinking “I could have had that house for $X” is wrong. They couldn’t have. It would have cost them more, since I would have paid more.

Counterproductive!

If you make yourself miserable, OP, you won't enjoy your house.

The only way that you can balance out the fact that you may, possibly, have overpaid for your house, is that you LOVE LIVING IN IT.

So work on your happiness and enjoy your lovely house.

I believe we also overpaid for our house as well but we really needed a house and it is a nice house so I just try not to think about it.

OP, even if you overpaid your house, like say 30K, it is nothing in the grand scheme of things. You will enjoy your house for the next ten years. And when it comes to sell, 30K will be noise in the total price.

-- from somebody who overpaid and bought the most expensive house in the neighborhood a decade ago.

I didn't read the thread.

I feel like we overpaid for our house. That was 4.5 years ago now. Will we ever find out? Who knows. No plans to move and 20 years from now how will we find old comps and measure relative performance. We will probably never know.

Stop stressing about this. It's done. Enjoy your lovely home and live your life.

You also don't know if the seller would have accepted less for your house, or if the open house hadn't been cancelled maybe it would have been bid up more. If you were bidding against someone else on the +$8k house, that one might have escalated higher. I don't think it's fair to assume you could have had that other house for only $8k more than you paid...sure, somebody did, but you would have had to outbid them.

Op,

Can you get a double vanity for your master bathroom and call it a day?

We overpaid for our house, too, OP. I won’t bother with the details, but we paid more than market for it.

I stressed about it a lot until my stepdad helped me think about it this way: the seller would not have accepted any less for this house. She didn’t have to move, and was not at all motivated to sell. It was a difficult and protracted contract negotiation process and it almost feel through more than once. We paid exactly what we had to pay in order to get the house.

Not sure if that would help in your situation, but it helped me.

I also agree with what others said - you need to take some deep breaths and move on. Don’t let a few thousand dollars prevent you from enjoying your home.