Two certificates, $47 of interest, and about sixty hours of my life

Posting this because I went looking for someone's version of it and couldn't find one.

I wanted to try liens directly before deciding anything. Registered in two counties, wired deposits, read the rules for both, drove to one auction and did the other online. Total prep and travel and sitting through the sales, roughly sixty hours across six weeks.

I put in about 40 bids. I won two. Everything else went to a small number of accounts bidding rates I wasn't willing to go to, and in one county the same three account numbers took what looked like most of the room. Both of my certificates redeemed inside five weeks. $3,900 of capital, $47 of interest.

Against that: $310 in travel, registration, and platform fees. So I paid $263 for the experience.

I'm not upset about the money. What I got for it is the understanding that this only makes sense with volume, because the interest per certificate is small and the fixed cost per auction is not. Two certificates can't carry a day of work. Two hundred might.

What I'd do differently: skip the drive and stick to jurisdictions that run everything online, and stop thinking of a small trial as a scaled-down version of the real thing. It isn't. The economics only appear at a size I don't currently have, so the actual decision in front of me is whether to build toward that size or put money with someone who already has.