If you've made the decision to sell your home, the next step becomes finding a new place to live. While this can be an exciting time, it can be more challenging if you're trying to sell your current home while buying a new home. Buying and selling at the same time can lead to mistakes that could cause significant delays or unexpected financial losses. That's why there are certain mistakes to avoid that you need to be aware of before you begin delving into the process.

1. Not Gaining Pre-Approval

Owning a home is a great way to improve your financial position. However, even though you were approved for a mortgage for your current home doesn't mean that you will be able to afford the new home that you've got your eye on. After all, your job situation could have changed, your debt load could have increased, or countless other factors could have changed, resulting in problems with mortgage approval. Therefore, it's important to take the time to apply for pre-approval so that you fully understand your financial standing before you pursue a home that you think is within your price range.

To be sure, this is an easy step to overlook, especially in the craziness of looking for a new home while preparing your current home for sale. To help make your buying process as smooth and seamless as possible, though, this should be your first stop when buying and selling at the same time.

2. Using Multiple Real Estate Agents

The role of a real estate agent is to stick by your side through the real estate transaction so that you can make wise decisions that will set you up for long-term success. As true as this is when working with one real estate agent, though, you may find that the exact opposite is true if you're trying to work with multiple agents during the buying and selling process.

As long as you don't try to work with the listing agent for the home you're buying, a single agent will easily be able to represent you well and ensure your interests are advocated for. If you try to work with multiple agents, you could find that their schedules are hard to coordinate, they have competing agendas, and that they just generally add much more complexity to the situation.

3. Closing On Both Properties The Same Day

For some people, the idea of dealing with complex real estate transactions on multiple days isn't appealing at all. Therefore, they try to coordinate everything so that they sell their current house and close on their new house on the exact same day. However, this approach could have disastrous consequences, especially if you're depending on the proceeds of the sale of your current home to fund the purchase of your new home.

Another challenge could pop-up if any problems occur on the part of the buyers of your home or on the part of the sellers of the home that you intend to buy. If anyone of these groups experiences a delay, it could throw everything off to the point that you have to reschedule all of the closing meetings, which could cost you a lot of money.

4. Ignoring Your Current Home

In all the excitement of finding your next home, it's easy to overlook your current home. When it comes time to list your current home for sale, though, this can be a big problem. You may run out of time to properly clean and repair your current home so that it's as photogenic as possible. This means that the pictures on the listing could attract less interest, thus leading to a lower selling price.

To help overcome this problem, it's a good idea to set a schedule in advance so that you can plan when you're going to do certain activities. This will help you stay accountable so that you don't get behind on preparing your home to look its best.

5. Assuming The Best

While many buying and selling transactions go smoothly, it's a mistake to assume that the same will happen when it comes to your transactions. While you should certainly prepare for the best, you must also plan for the worst. In most cases, this means having enough extra money available to take care of unexpected events that occur.

For example, you may encounter costs with hotels, short-term rental properties, storage facilities, home preparation, moving assistance, and more. With that many potential expenses, it's easy to see why you should plan to have plenty of money on hand if you're planning to buy and sell at the same time. Of course, everything could go smoothly and you won't end up needing these contingency plans. Not needing them and not having them, though, are two very different scenarios.