Well, there goes my down payment on a house

My very first stock option grants, that I’ve been sitting on for 10 years, were set to expire the 16th. I’d been amassing money in my brokerage account to buy them in time, and thought I had it covered. Unfortunately, rather than expiring them on the 16th, a Sunday, they expired at market closing today, Friday in the US. And now I’m out quite a chunk of money.

At least the company stock was at an all-time low, so really, I could save up the same amount of money they were worth in about 5-6 months and buy better stock anyway. Still, that was a lot of money that I was hoping to use. My own fault though, I let that slide far, far too long.