I must have been the only person on earth worried we’d gotten too aggressive and low-balled the seller in the midst of the mortgage fiasco that erupted last spring. When my husband and I still didn’t have a counteroffer 48 hours after submitting our bid, I was devastated. “They don’t want to sell anymore!” I wailed. My husband—who tends to be more, ahem, levelheaded—was unfazed. “You cannot get emotional about this,” he chided. He’s right, according to experts. Besides not getting attached to your potential home (if you do, you’re likely to pay more than you can afford), there’s one other golden rule of negotiating: Start with a fair offer to show you mean business, because nothing turns off a seller more than lowballing him, says Wayne Beals, a broker with MetroPro Realty. (In this market, a “fair” price could be as much as 10 percent below the asking price—look up the sale prices of comparable homes in the area.) There’s other sneaky stuff you can do to finagle a better purchase price—for example, end your bid price with an odd number instead of a zero or a five to make it seem like you’ve got insider info, and take your sweet time counter offering to freak out the other party. But Beals says those tricks aren’t effective. When the ink finally dried, we got our condo at a good price—thanks to my better half handling the negotiations…while I secretly rode an emotional roller coaster.