A few years ago, I decided to indulge my life-long interest in astronomy to purchase a good telescope for backyard viewing. When I began checking suppliers and equipment reviews, I was astonished at the sheer volume of equipment available from a large number of manufacturers. In addition to the telescope itself, you need a mount and tripod, eyepieces and a finder scope or device. Then there are endless accessories and gadgets for specialized tasks. There are likely dozens and dozens of choices for each item, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars each.
And that’s just for visual astronomy; if you want to get serious about astrophotography, there is a prodigious array of cameras and accessories, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars each.
I did end up buying a modest visual telescope rig that cost about $2000, all in. Since then, I’ve added another $1500 in accessories. I’ve found the temptation to constantly upgrade difficult to resist, as it is fed by browsing supplier websites for newer and better equipment.
So what hobbies do you have that consume your disposable income at an extravagant rate? I would also include outdoor recreation and sports hobbies, though if you fly helicopters for fun, I expect you will be at the high end of the sample.
None of my hobbies or outdoor activities is terribly expensive, except for traveling. I have traveled around the world twice and spent more money doing so than I should have.
My primary “hobby” these days is writing, which, other than the cost of a good laptop, isn’t very expensive. It mainly costs me time. My favorite outdoor activity is hiking on trails with my dog in the woods near my house, which is free, except for having to buy a good pair of hiking shoes every year since I wear them out so quickly.
As a kid, I was also fascinated by astronomy, and I had a decent telescope, but I soon got bored seeing the same things in the sky every night. If I had the proper equipment today, I’d want to take photos with it, and it would cost many thousands of dollars, but I lost interest somewhere along the way.
Over the past 10+ years, there’s three things I’d name as hobbies. Welding, fish/aquariums and 3D printing.
Welding was very expensive to get into. I ran power out to my garage, and over the years accumulated 2 Welders, a plasma cutter, a big air compressor and whatever else I needed along the way. I should probably sell some of that equipment. It rarely gets used and I never got all that great at it but it’s nice to have around and I’m glad I learned what I did. I’d still love to get a few hours with an instructor over my shoulder instead of watching youtube videos.
Aquariums. I had a fresh water tank for maybe 10 years. That was cheap. In fact, once I stopped adding more fish to it, it was practically free other than some cheap consumables (filters, food etc). Then I got into saltwater tanks. That’s a hobby that can get expensive in a hurry. Just to support my 40g tank, I’ve got ~$5k with of equipment. Granted, it’s not all purchased at once and it’s not even all necessary. But, for example, across my tanks, I have close to a thousand dollars just in lights. “The next time XXX needs to be replaced, I’m getting out of the hobby” isn’t uncommon to see on message boards. Just last week, I got home from work, heard a broken pump making noise, hopped back in my car and spent $100 to fix it. And that was because they had the $100 repair part in stock, otherwise I would’ve had to replace the entire thing for $350. To make it worse, it’s a niche hobby with the biggest supplier being bought out by an investment company so now it’s even more expensive.
3D printing doesn’t have to be expensive. You can get a printer for a few hundred bucks and spool of filament for $20 and start printing. But then you can upgrade to a $1200 printer, buy dozens upon dozens of rolls of filament and god knows how much on arduinos and raspberry pis and motors and LED strips and wires and tools etc etc etc, which is where I am. With 3D printing, it’s not uncommon for me to spent $100+ dollars on a single project.
I do all the cooking for my family (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) so the only added expense is that I buy a slightly higher quality of ingredients, with a greater variety, than if I were doing pure subsistence cooking. Therefore… not very expensive, on a net cost basis, I guess.
My wife and I are avid fly fishers. It can be very, very expensive, but doesn’t have to be. The better you get at it, the less fancy gear you find that you need, but the traveling can cost. We travel a lot for it and that gets pricey; every year we travel to Chilean Patagonia to fly fish from a lodge there. It’s not cheap.
I haven’t been actively collecting meteorites in years (because of expense) but a very basic collection of small samples of common meteorites can be very cheap, but that is a gateway drug to wanting not small samples of not common meteorites, not cheap. You start with being thrilled that you have a lump of a rock from space! that you bought for 10 bucks and go to being sad that you don’t have any $50,000 museum-grade pieces in your collection and that you can’t fly around the world searching new fall locations like The Big Boys.
I wouldn’t exactly call it a hobby, but I collect a few things. One of the things I collect is items related to some more obscure (less memorable?), older local rock bands. This includes posters, acetate demo LPs, unusal or unreleased recordings, publicity photos, and even releases in unusual formats (cassette and 8-track). Since the bands are/were not nationally famous, the purchases are usually pretty modest. For example, an acetate demo might be around $40 and I probably spend less than $200/year on this. I’m more interested in “the hunt” itself. In a couple cases, professional and semi-professional photographers have reached out and sent me photos they took of the bands 40 or 50 years ago. “The photo shoot was free for the band, I can do with the photos whatever i want. Here you go!”
Some of my friends know that I do this, but NOBODY is interested. I think my wife is the only one who has ever seen my collections.
My brother. When I first took on a financial planner, he asked me what my biggest expenses are. My honest answer was “live music and women”.
So seriously, concerts. I go to over 150 shows a year. Some are like $20 or even no cover shows at clubs in town. Some are front row at larger venues for over $300 or more expensive charity gigs. I’m a patron at a couple of local venues if you count my donations to them. I’ll generally go out of town for a few days two or three times a year for runs or festivals and will get VIP status for fests and that will include hotels and possibly airfare. I haven’t done the math but it has to be in the $10k per year range.
One vote here for changing that hobby descriptor to “dating”, thanks. (Or even “wooing the ladies”, if you want to retain some of that comic sleazy-1970s-polyester-suited-swinger vibe.)
Me, I don’t know exactly how my various textile-arts hobbies shake out between net savings and net expense. Savings: “I’m making and mending my own clothes and house linens, I’m so frugal!!” Expense: “Bish you just bought ten yards of silk noil and eight skeins of longwool and antique buttons, frugal my ass.”
Oh, and the seasonal caterpillar-rearing hobby is basically cost-free, what with making supplies out of recyclables. (Suddenly remembers all those Caterpillar Lab visits and merch, and shuts up.)
My hobby is my horse. Therefore very expensive. Board. Lessons. Feed. Supplements. Carrots. Farrier every 6 weeks. Hay. About $1300 a month. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I, too, am a fly fisher, but I didn’t pickup the hobby until I was a bit older. I was initially rather gobsmacked by the cost of getting started (decent rods, fly lines, waders, boots, etc.) when compared to the other forms of fishing I had engaged in as a youth, but when you consider the cost of a bass boat and a new truck to pull it with, it really wasn’t so bad!
I also decided to tie my own flies because, I mean really, how much can a small hook, some thread, and a feather or two actually cost. I even created a spreadsheet to track how much I spent on tools and materials, then divided by the number of flies tied to get my cost per fly. In the first year, after gathering all the different types and colors of feathers, fur, thread, hooks, and other assorted goods required for each of the different patterns of flies to be tied, I had gotten my cost down to just under $8 per fly. I’m sure I’m a bit under that by now, since I currently have a pretty good inventory of materials on hand, but I do still have to occasionally buy some new something to tie a particular pattern. So spending a dollar or three to buy a few of the hot pattern for one particular trip isn’t any big deal.
I like to paint little miniature figures for table top war games like Warhammer and for role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. In 2023, I spent $1,300 on miniature figures alone and $315 on supplies like paints, thinners, masking putty, etc., etc. When COVID hit in 2020, I suddenly found myself with no place to go and a lot of extra time on my hands, so I took the plunge and got a middling airbrush and once I got the compressor and paint booth probably set me back about $450 or so.
I don’t generally keep track of how much I spend on my little hobby. I’ve slowed down my purchases a bit because I’m running out of room to store everything and I’ve got a lot of unpainted projects.
I guess my main one is gardening, which is pretty hard to quantify. I mean, the amount of garden space was a major selling point for the house, does the house price get included in the hobby cost? I do get food from it; though it would be cheaper to just buy the fruit and veg, I do grow things I can’t readily find for sale, so it’s tricky to work out the value. When I had more free time and a mature allotment plot at my old place, I’m pretty certain I had a few years where I harvested more value than I spent, but I really was on a tight budget back then and there was a very good local free/swapping network.
I would total this year’s cost up to about £800, but it’s been my biggest year of spending- as I now own a house rather than rent, I’ve bought a proper polytunnel and some fruit trees. Most years I’d say it tops out at £1-200, largely in fuel going to garden centres and entry fees for garden visits, plus seeds, occasional bulbs, replacing tools and plants, which are mostly from the discount table as that’s more satisfying even when I do have the cash for full price ones.
Can you play the games with proxy figures or knockoffs or your own 3D models or do you have to have official ones? If you have official ones do they have to be painted?
I never got in to fly tying, it just didn’t click for me. I didn’t start fly fishing until later, too. I never liked conventional fishing, but once I tried fly fishing, I was immediately addicted. There are perfectly good rods that don’t cost a fortune, but the problem is that when you first start it’s all so bewildering that it’s hard not to fall for the advertising hype.
Astronomy, as a hobby, can range anywhere from no cost to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (though at some point there, you switch from calling yourself an “amateur astronomer” to “philanthropist”). For a little more than the free option, you can pick up a cheap pair of used binoculars, or pay a few bucks for dues for membership in a club with access to very nice telescopes (I once found myself manning a 20 inch telescope all night, in one of the few true dark-sky locations on the continent: Now that was an experience!).
My main hobbies are reading, computer games, and 3D printing. Reading, of course, is free or very close to it, with access to a public library. Computer games are very cheap, especially since I tend to play a small number of games and stick with them for a year or more. And 3D printing can be even cheaper than @Joey_P says, if you have access to a public makerspace: Many of them will let you print for only the cost of materials. It’s also one of those hobbies that can actually net you some positive income. I haven’t fully accounted it, but I reckon that I’ve probably earned about as much as I’ve spent.
Though it should be noted that 3D printing is actually two different hobbies: For some people (like myself), it’s all about the designing, and occasionally turning a design into an actual object, while for others, it’s about the process of using the printer itself, and where the designs come from is almost irrelevant. If you’re going the public-makerspace route, you might not ever actually touch a 3D printer yourself, in which case the second sort of hobbyist might not get any enjoyment from it at all. On the other hand, if you’re buying your own printer, the cheapest ones need constant maintenance, tweaking, and playing around with the settings, which would be frustrating to the first sort of hobbyist but exactly what the second sort likes.
