The great thing about AirBnB is that you can often get an apartment with a kitchen, and you can at least have breakfast there cheaply and other meals as you wish. Our rental in Copenhagen was close to a little grocery - and public transportation.
My big hobby is collecting sf books, and while the mass of them is worth a bit, I’ve accumulated them, mostly used, over 50 years.
I guess my philosophy has always been “do I need the money for something else?” Sure, you could always save it, but I tend to set a savings goal and work towards it so as long as I’m not messing with that program, I like to enjoy the excess.
Any hobby can be expensive, but they can also be cheap. I like sports cars, and my favorite of all time was my 1983 Porsche 944, bought for $2500. I switched back to motorcycles a while back, and you can find amazing bikes of all types on the cheap (I just missed out on a 1963 Honda CB77 Super Hawk that went for a grand - it’s the model Pirsig rode in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
Done that! The plane tickets are usually the killer.
Well crap…
Now I don’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt over my $1k niche bass amp that is so obscure that I couldn’t find any to play anywhere without going to NY or Philly, so I just bought it sight-unseen and unheard from a dealer in Seattle (it met and exceeded every expectation I had, by the way).
I’ll print this thread out and show my wife next time I feel guilty over a new instrument appearing in the house.
My hobby is roleplaying gaming. I spend very little on it:
-My main system, Pathfinder, is available online for free.
-Dice are 50 cents each, and my collection of 30-40 dice is ample and lasts me years.
-The last gaming convention I traveled to cost two tanks of gas and $100 for a long weekend’s worth of food and lodging (an incredible deal). The bottle of bourbon I took down almost cost more than my daily expenses.
I also spend maybe $100-$200 a year on computer games.
10% a year sounds super high to me.
Glad to help out!
My established “hobbies” include hiking/backpacking, tent camping, canoeing, and cycling. Most of these were done while I was a Boy Scout leader (and my son was in the troop). Our troop camps out monthly, and every campout includes some kind of activity, usually hiking/backpacking, and sometimes cycling or canoeing. I have literally all the gear you can imagine for these activities, both for me and my son.
I’ve always tried to get middle-of-the-road gear, not the cheapest (i.e. Walmart), and not the most expensive. I’m sure it has still added up over the past 12 years.
Since my son graduated from high school last year, I’ve added two more activities: scuba diving and downhill skiing, both for me and my son. My wife has commented that both of these activities aren’t cheap, and I’ve been cognizant of that as well, so I’ve been trying to go slow and *not * run out and buy all of the gear associated with these. So far, then, we’ve pretty much been using rental gear for the most part.
We skied often enough this past winter, though, that I’m ready to buy some skis and boots next year.
As for scuba, we have our own masks, fins, snorkels, and dive computers. We’re still renting regulators, BCDs, and tanks. (We haven’t needed wetsuits yet.) At some point, I’ll probably pull the trigger on the remaining gear.
There’s no way we’re spending 10% of our income on these “hobbies,” but if you add the cost of vacations and travel, that sounds about right.
Reading all these post (and the percentages), I’m sort of wondering about the definition of “hobby” as well as if we are talking about pre- or after tax income.
For instance skiing and snowboarding. I’m not particularly difficult about my equipment and most of it is 15 years old, sometimes I travel to go snowboarding but often it is a multi purpose trip. How to categorize?
If we are talking about the money I spend on things that I like to do for fun and which are optional, it is at least 50% of my after tax income.
I consider entertainment seperate from hobbies. If I take a vacation I might include some white water rafting, fishing, sight seeing that I wouldn’t count as hobby money. If my vacation is centered around my hobby as it often is I would consider most of the vacation as a hobby expense. Thats is not really a fair way to look at it as if I did not have the hobby I would likely be spending more on entertainment. They probably should be lumped together.
How much you can afford to spend on a hobby varies a great deal on which person in the family you ask. I think my husband spent way too much on his hobbies. He did not.
Do any of you have such differences with your significant other?
My Ex-Creep thought I spent too much money on books. Like any at all. One of many reasons he is my Ex-Creep.
Beading is expensive and addictive. I’ll never use up all the beads. I’ll never stop buying new ones.
Photography is expensive, but not as expensive as it was when you had to buy and process film.
Sewing can be expensive, but I am a bargain hunter.
The cheapest hobby I have is freehand embroidery. I showed a friend how I could get her started for less than $5.
It sounds super high to me too, so I hope this 10% figure people have been kicking around was not inspired by my earlier post. I was trying to make it very clear that hobby-related expenses should fall within a 5-10% recreation budget*:
(Emphasis added.)
Unless you spend absolutely nothing on other forms of recreation – no cable TV, no Netflix, no event tickets, no buying books/magazines/movies/music/games, no vacations, no going out for a drink with your buddies – then 10% seems an unreasonable amount for most people to be spending on a hobby.
*I’m not a financial planner or anything, but budgeting 5-10% of your net income for recreation seems to be the standard advice. See for instance Financial Mentor’s budget calculator.
Whatever anybody else wants to do with their money is no concern of mine, but I can’t imagine spending 10% of my income on my own hobbies. Hobbies, recreation, and travel for pleasure combined probably consume 2 or 3% of my income. I was trained from an early age by my very frugal parents that hobbies should be something that saves money (like auto repair, vegetable gardening, cooking or sewing) or at least doesn’t cost any significant amount of money (like reading books from the library or hiking close to home without special equipment). They would roll over in their graves if they thought any of their children were spending 10% of their income on hobbies. I mostly absorbed the lesson and my main hobbies are:
gardening (probably saves on out-of-pocket expenses but I have to admit I’d probably be better off using the hours to take a part-time job and spending the wages on produce)
cooking (saves money, because I have to eat, and I resist the temptation to buy the fanciest equipment and ingredients except on rare occasions)
writing fiction (free)
reading (low cost since I either borrow from the library or buy used)
taking MOOCs and other online classes, usually free, from the likes of Duolingo and EdX (not quite free since I sometimes buy the recommended textbook or reference book and sometimes pay a modest fee for a verified certificate)
hiking, snowshoeing, and backpacking. This is the most expensive of my hobbies, not mostly for the equipment (which can be expensive, but I hunt for bargains and do without the latest and best equipment), but mostly for the travel expenses of getting to the trailheads.
I spent about 3½ weeks in hotels rooms last year attending either races or festivals. I would not necessarily have any desire to be where I was the other 51+ weeks of the year.
- Some of those nights were covered by the event
Consider also how a hobby keeps you away from doing something bad like going to the bars.
Or it just might make you feel better so its cheaper than going to a therapist or these people who spend money going on retreats or somewhere exotic to get “in touch” with themselves.
Rethinking my original question it probably was not a fair question, whatever discretionary spending we do each month is really the bottom line. If we spend more on hobbies we spend less on something else and vice versa. When we start running up the credit cards is when it really becomes an issue.
I have the rather obscure hobby of collecting failed American firearms. The more likely it is to explode in your face, the more I want it. While these guns tend to be inexpensive relatively speaking, since very few people want them, they also tend to be pretty rare, since they are failures.
Aside from the fact I was running out of room to display them, their price also started escalating rapidly, especially when I started getting into failures from the Civil War. Add to that the fact that some were only quasi-legal because they were post-1899 (i.e. considered a modern firearm), but did not appear on any firearms lists since the companies had long since gone out of business after producing only a handful of examples. I started the hobby with the goal of getting one particular firearm, which was exceedingly rare, and when I eventually found one for a fair price, I sort of felt like I had ‘completed’ the hobby, so now I need something else to do. At my worst point, though, I was probably only spending about 5% of my income on this hobby.