Sunk cost fallacy

Most of us are familiar with the economic concept of “sunk cost fallacy.” That is, our decisions about what to do are often shaped by the amount of time and/or money we have already invested in a thing. We judge its value based on the money we spent on it, not the actual market value. I am talking about the most general non-academic definition of this concept, obviously. Yesterday a journalist from the Star Ledger/ NJ.com, Matt Stanmyre, interviewed me for a human-interest piece about my experience with Fulbright.

https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/03/this-nj-professor-landed-her-dream-job-in-italy-then-coronavirus-wiped-it-out.html

View to Piazza del Popolo from the window of a mini public bus on Saturday, March 7, 2020. The popolo were conspicuously absent.

I created a list of the money we spent preparing to move to Italy to share with him and it’s pretty astonishing. This is only the non-refundable money we spent.

In dollars, we paid, in estimate: 

$60 wire fees to pay rent

$60 train trips to NYC to appear at Consulate for visa applications (required for stays of over 90 days) 

$56 x 4 for visa applications for each family member 

$1100 for 4 one-way flights to Rome

$1600 for 4 one-way flights home 

$400 in airport transfers 

$12 to notarize documents for the visa applications 

$30 in passport photos 

$225 in passport renewal fees 

$428 for insurance required by the Italian government for the visa [which was cancelled and refunded without explanation while we were still in Italy???] 

In euros, we paid: 

110 for the Permesso di Soggiorno (residence permit) application – for stays of over 90 days – which is now on hold? Unnecessary? I don’t know. 

50  for household goods we had to leave behind (one of these items was a hair dryer, which is silly to specify but emblematic of what you buy when plan to live somewhere versus going as a tourist)

I took a reduced salary from RVCC that included working over winter break without being paid in order to be off-campus for the spring term. 

When I started this blog, I thought I would be writing about the challenges of teaching U.S. history at a confusing and tumultuous time in our nation. I never in a million years thought I would become the story in this tragic way.

So, I guess I don’t really know why I’m sharing this with you except as an ongoing effort to process what happened. Financial losses, on paper, are easier to track than emotional ones.