I play music. I have 3 instruments that cost a total of $15-20k, but don’t intend to buy any more. Each year I go to 2 “camps”, which are $1k each. That’s about it.
A good friend is an avid gardener that grows his own food and there’s no way it’s profitable but his produce is generally the best I’ve ever had. No one can come close to his tomatoes or strawberries. I’m certain you can say the same.
I play chess and bridge, where the only real expense is joining a club. (Playing either online is cheap.)
However I always wanted a model railway (I’m English and we are fond of steam trains 
), so when I retired I installed one for about $1500.
Does that make her a… nope nope nope, not gonna say it 
I enjoyed the good fortune of having a friend who is truly an expert at fly fishing (his family lived alongside the Deschutes River in Oregon; he has been fly fishing hundreds of hours per year since he was 3 years old).
Having someone like that as a guide & instructor saves a whole lot of time, trouble, and money spent the wrong way. My total investment in equipment amounts to a few hundred dollars.
Nice. That’s almost as expensive as my sons’ hobby - Warhammer.
I play D&D, and I already have all the books I need, so my hobby is only time consuming, not cash consuming.
Oh, I agree that there are good rods that can be had without breaking the bank. I started with an inexpensive 8’6” 4wt just to see if I liked it. As things progressed it turned out I needed a 7’3” 3wt for the small streams I prefer fishing for trout, a 9’ 6wt for warm water (bass) fishing, a 9’ 8wt for salt water, and a custom made bamboo rod just because. And those are just the rods I use on a regular basis. But I think the part that hurt the most when starting out was figuring out exactly which $80+ fly line worked best with which rod. Fortunately there’s a fly shop relatively nearby that also teaches fly fishing classes so they have a good supply of reels already loaded with different weight lines that they would let me try with my rod(s) to find the one(s) that best fit my casting preferences.
I know a few fly fishing nuts. It’s an interesting avocation. One friend designed and sold a popular fly that earned him several hundred dollars a year. At first he made them all himself but eventually sold the rights to some outfit and got royalties.
That guy told me about the really crazy purists. Only bamboo rods. I think no reels. They’d bring a net to the river and catch some insects and then make the fly lures on site to match.
Since I gave up skiing about five years ago, my hobby expenses have all been the type that are pretty much free to indulge after the initial equipment costs.
Any new surfboard I would consider buying is north of $1200 but I’m still content with the two I have owned for ten years now.
My four pinball machines cost me in a range from $200 to $9000 each but they have all appreciated in value. My wife has drawn the line at four, so anytime I want to get a new one, I have to let one go, which covers almost all of the cost of the new one.
I’m not sure if live entertainment and travel count as hobbies but I sometimes spend hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to see a garage band in a bar with a $20 cover. Next year, I am going on another Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise ($5000 plus $1500 in airfare for two). In October, I’m flying to Japan for a handful of garage/surf/rockabilly shows. I have no idea what the air and lodging will cost on that trip, but the cost at the door is just a few thousand yen.
I’m a ‘do it yourselfer’ I have thousands and thousands of dollars of tools. Not so much a hobby as a necessity, but I do enjoy it.
Now recently retired. I bought a very nice Yamaha electric piano. Partially because my cousin does visit, and likes to play (she started playing when she was about 6, and her piano got destroyed in a flood). But both my wife and I want to learn, and signed up for lessons.
I’ve owned a couple motorboats in my life-- a runabout with an outboard motor, and a bowrider with an inboard / outboard motor. Both boats I bought used for not an exorbitant amount of money up front, but, boy howdy, do repairs and maintenance burn a hole in your wallet. This old joke is about as true as it gets: “What does ‘boat’ stand for? ‘Break out another thousand’”. As is this joke: “What are the two happiest days of a boat owner’s life? The day he buys his boat, and the day he sells it”.
These days our only watercraft are a a couple kayaks, and I am very happy to not have any more motorboats.
I know people who make the flies from feathers of birds that they shot that were retrieved by dogs they trained. I also know a guy who cuts the hooks off his flies and just wants to get the eat from the trout, he’s one step away from just meditating about fly fisihing.
I was lucky that the manager of the first fly shop I went to was a very reasonable person. He set me up with an affordable outfit that lasted me for years. My wife and I have both amassed a fortune in fly rods, but that has been by choice. I doubt I’ll ever buy another rod. By far my biggest expense is travel. I’m happy fishing local streams for bass and brook trout, but we both do like to travel for fishing. Like I said, we do Chile every year, the lodge is fairly affordable (much more affordable than a comparable lodge in Montana), but the airfare to get there is what gets you.
I was talking to my sister and she mentioned that her husband drove 300 miles to get in one day of fly fishing on the last day of the season. I thought that was insane until I realized that I’ve done the exact same thing many times for a concert.
There’s an old joke: two anglers are fishing in the pouring rain. In the distance, they see two golfers on the links, “look at those idiots out golfing in this mess.”
My gardening expenses are higher than that, especially when you figure in the cost of electricity to run several fluorescent/LED indoor light stands for raising ornamentals and vegetable crop seedlings (some of the lighting is shut down during the summer).
Growing vegetables is the least expensive aspect. I freeze some of what I harvest, especially eggplant and peppers. Given how much eggplant we consume, there might actually be savings there.
Raising annuals and perennials from seed or cuttings, and buying end-of-season sale plants cuts costs some. The total spent on gardening might run as high as $1500 a year or more but I make some of it back from free subscriptions to my gardening Substack. 
A long dreamed-of major expenditure never happened, as plans for a greenhouse crashed in the face of the pandemic and not being able to find anyone to construct it.
It used to be woodworking. The tools are bad enough, but the price for good large dimension wood that is square and unblemished, especially “exotics”, is ruinous. In Portland I never got out of the local woodworking supply house for under $300. Good tools run the gamut. You can pick up a perfectly serviceable 1940s/50s Stanley plane for $40, or you can by a new Lie-Nielsen brass beauty for about $500. You can never have enough clamps, and good ones are expensive. You can get by with a standard table saw for a couple hundred or you can buy a Festool or Rockler track saw for about $900, or go all out for the safest saw out there, a Sawstop, for about $4,000. The types of saws, chisels, sanders, etc. is seemingly endless. There is also the large number of stains and other finishes, bottles of glue, drawers full of fasteners, dowels, etc. And unless you’re making things to sell or give away (and actually have the talent to make something that doesn’t look like crap), you run out of projects pretty quickly or end up with a house full of cutting boards. I still have at least five, an end table, a shop stool (but no shop), two magazine holders that don’t have any magazines in them, and a couple of chairs that I found on a curb and revitalized (they never get sat on), etc. Yeah, I miss it.
Cycling is my main hobby nowadays. It could be expensive but I’m not really interested in “the gear”. I have a couple of cheap second hand bikes (under 500) and a cheap bike helmet and some lights thats it. My main cost is maintenance as I have no interest in doing it myself, and I put in enough miles that stuff breaks fairly regularly.
I used to ski a lot which is properly pricey. But I’ve only managed to get my family on the slopes once since I had kids (that one trip was mighty expensive mind you)
Hobby 1 - Music. I am mostly done buying instruments, amps and pedals. I’ve learned I don’t need more. Mostly 
Hobby 2 - Motorcycling. I have a great dual-sport that will probably last till I die but I will need one more 2-up moto. Probably a BMW to replace the Buell.
Hobby 3 - Cycling. As I get older and have more money, I turn that money into lighter bicycles. And I will need several more. I have a mountain, touring, gravel and in-town EV. All will need to be upgraded at some point. Carbon is getting expensive these days and I don’t yet own one of them. Actually, I will never replace my titanium touring/road bike…I love that bike and have ridden it many thousands of miles. The rest of them though…they will be replaced. I do most of my own maintenance and have a lot of blue colored tools which were expensive when I bought them.
Hobby 4 - Woodworking. I am an amateur but make a few great things like picture/painting frames, plant stands (I make fantastic plant stands), and small things like bedside tables. I’m not like @Chefguy and build with fairly simple tools and use inexpensive wood (we get great hemlock and straight dimensional wood in these parts and I can plane that down). I’m going to build a couple Adirondack chairs this spring.
Agreed.
FTR I’m no swinger.
My current GF & I are coming up on our 1 year anniversary this week. We’ve been exclusive since the git-go and are making noises about becoming permanent cohabiters together. My previous GF was the same story for just shy of a year.
But my / our hobby is wining, dining, live music, and traveling. With her if she’s free, without if not. But I find it’s a lot easier for me to get up the gumption to go big if she’s part of the plan. So is that me spending on her, me, or us? Yes it is. Our anniversary celebration includes a 5-day NYE cruise leaving later today.
Ref @hajario’s financial planner … IMO the upside to hobbies like this is there’s little need for storage space, and not much capital investment that’s hard to recoup when you’re over that hobby. And no pile of residue for your kin to dispose of somehow after you’re gone.
And most of all as a retiree, it’s desirable that your monthly expenses be biased towards things that are easy / cheap to stop doing. Somebody whose monthly costs are largely locked into monthly payments may become screwed in a downturn or health crisis. Conversely, somebody whose monthly nut is relatively small and their monthly discretionary individually one-time expenses are relatively large can pull in their horns much more quickly & efficiently if necessary.
For Warhammer, in particular, my understanding is that, to play at an official event, yes, you need to have the actual Games Workshop minis, and I believe that they must be painted, too.
For D&D and other RPGs, miniatures use is nearly always optional, and even if you’re playing at an “organized play event,” while they might want you to have some sort of mini or token to represent your character on the battle map, it doesn’t need to be an official mini, and doesn’t even need to be painted. I’ve GMed at organized play events where players brought a mix of really nice-looking full-color minis, unpainted minis, and tokens or dice, to use for their characters.