the.com/money pit
A home improvement project that improves nothing but your bank's quarterly earnings.
means A house, project, or venture that keeps demanding money with no end in sight, swallowing cash the way a bottomless pit swallows anything dropped into it.
from Literal money pits are old folklore treasure-hunt sites — most famously the Oak Island 'Money Pit' in Nova Scotia, a shaft diggers have poured fortunes into since the 1800s chasing rumored buried treasure that never quite surfaces. The phrase jumped into everyday speech as a joke about any endeavor, especially a house, that eats money the same way: you keep digging, keep spending, and the payoff never comes. The 1986 Tom Hanks film 'The Money Pit,' about a disastrous home renovation, cemented the term in its modern domestic sense.
- origin
- term predates the 1986 Tom Hanks movie
- classic example
- any house with charming historic plumbing
- true cost rule
- double the contractor's first estimate, then add more
- also applies to
- boats, startups, and exes