I bought my childhood home at a foreclosure auction in 2019 and it was the worst financial decision of my life and I would do it again.

I'm forty-seven. The house is in a town in western Pennsylvania you wouldn't know. Three bedrooms, built 1948, on a corner lot.

My parents owned it from 1979 to 2004. We lost it in 2004 — my father's business, a second mortgage, the usual sequence. I was twenty-six and living in Pittsburgh and I found out after it had already happened, from my mother, by phone, in a four-minute call.

The house went through three owners between 2004 and 2018. The last one defaulted.

In 2019 it came up at the county tax sale and I bought it for fifty-one thousand dollars, which at the time I thought was a steal, and which was in fact approximately what it was worth.

Here's the arithmetic, in full, because this is the only useful thing in this post.

Purchase: fifty-one thousand, cash, which was most of what I had.

Roof: fourteen thousand two hundred. It had been patched three times and was done.

The basement: this is the one. There was water, and the water was from a lateral sewer line that had collapsed under the front yard, and that is not a repair, that is an excavation. Nineteen thousand six hundred.

Electrical: the panel was from 1962 and no insurer would write a policy on it. Six thousand eight hundred.

Furnace, 2021: five thousand four hundred.

Plus the small things, which came to about eleven thousand over four years.

So: fifty-one to buy and about fifty-seven to make it a house. And the current market value, per an appraisal I paid for last spring because I was considering selling: eighty-nine thousand.

I am down about nineteen thousand dollars plus four years of weekends, and I am aware that if I had put fifty-one thousand into an index fund in 2019 I would have roughly doubled it.

My wife knows all these numbers. She has never once said the obvious thing. That is the single kindest thing anybody has ever done for me and I have never thanked her for it, because thanking her would require saying out loud what she is being kind about.

Now the part that isn't arithmetic.

I don't live in it. That's what nobody understands. I live in Pittsburgh, ninety minutes away. We rent the house out — eight hundred and fifty a month to a very decent couple in their thirties, which covers taxes and insurance and not much else.

So I bought a house I don't live in, for more than it's worth, in a town I left at eighteen.

What I actually bought, and I know this and I'll say it plainly: I bought the fact that it isn't gone. In 2004 it stopped being ours in a four-minute phone call, and for fifteen years there was a house standing on a corner lot with other people's furniture in it, and I drove past it in 2011 and had to pull over.

And there's one specific thing. In the doorframe between the kitchen and the hall, there are pencil marks with dates. 1983 through 1994. Me and my sister. Four owners and twenty-one years and nobody painted that doorframe.

When I closed on the house I went in alone, before anybody else, and I stood in that doorway for a while, and that's the moment the nineteen thousand dollars bought.

My father died in 2016 and never saw it. My mother is seventy-eight and has been in it twice, and the second time she said, "You should have let it go, honey," and then she went and stood in the kitchen doorway for a long time.