That’s another one that can be net positive. I don’t consider it a hobby, per se, but I cycle a lot. And yeah, I do end up shelling out money for maintenance and repairs. But I also buy gas about three times per year, because most places that most people drive to, I bike (including commuting to work). The gas money I save alone is easily enough to cover the bike costs.
Our hobby is board gaming. If you just add up the games we have, it’s probably $3,000. If you add the trips we take to board gaming conventions, including paying for our kids, we’re somewhere in the $40K-$50K range. It does get a little tricky to calculate since all our trips to Texas conventions include friend/family visits, but I counted it all as board gaming.
Stretched over 10 years or so that ain’t bad.
We all thought it!
Yeah - I golf too. Just spent $3k on a new set of clubs. Last bought woods 20 yrs ago, irons 30+. Hopefully the last clubs I’ll buy.
I currently play 2 rounds/week - generally Apr-Nov. Expect to ramp up to 3 rounds when I retire. We generally pay <$60 per round. I expect to take about $200 worth of lessons next spring. Recently began adding @ $20/week in range fees.
Most of my tools were of the pedestrian sort. The only splurge I made was for a Lie-Nielsen bench plane, but my favorite plane was an old Stanley smoothing plane (about 14" long) that I found in an antique shop for $30. I put a new Hock blade in it, but otherwise it was as flat as the day it came off the Stanley line in about 1945 or so. My wood of choice for many projects was cherry, which was fairly reasonable.
I’m a hobby sort of guy and phase-y and my interests come and go but I’d guess 20 or more hours for each in 2025. At this point, I don’t spend or buy much except for travel for events. I used to ski but haven’t in a while.
$$$ Electronics: amateur radio, scanners, event audio, lasers, event lighting. ($1k
$$$ Music production: keyboard/piano player, EDM, finger drumming & percussion ($1k)
$ Art: mostly pens & inks, calligraphy, paper. Very inexpensive and gratifying. ($200)
$$ Cooking: bbq/smoking, exotic ingredients. I do cook quite a lot. (Tough to guess cost of hobby eating)
$ Poker, two local games. $500?
$ Motorsports: escooter! I was surprised at how much I enjoy this thing this year. Hardly any bicycles or car interests at the moment. ($400 with helmet, headlamp)
Eta estimated dollar values for 2025, not including travel. $$$ is still pretty low.
I’m not a “hobby” person, but I have two that might qualify
For the past few years I have been trying to get back in shape. We have three machines in our home gym that I do actually use. Each was expensive, and each requires a monthly subscription. Tonal, Hydrow, and Peloton. Not terribly expensive, and certainly worth it to me.
The other hobby is wine. Drinking, not collecting. We easily spend more than $1,000 per month on wine.
My main hobby is Dungeons & Dragons, and other role-playing games.
It can be somewhat expensive, primarily because the books can run from $20 to $100 each – and, particularly for the bigger games (such as D&D and Pathfinder), there can be a lot of books, though many of them contain supplemental rules, and thus aren’t strictly needed to play the game. When I played game systems like those, I was probably spending $300 to $500 a year on books alone.
On top of that, there are a lot of accessories which gamers love to buy: dice (a lot of gamers are obsessive about buying new dice), gaming maps/mats, miniatures, etc.
But, these days, I mostly play other game systems, which aren’t as “stuff-heavy.” The main game system which I run at conventions, “Fate Core,” is pretty rules-light, and I haven’t bought any new stuff for it in several years. So, my monetary investment for running/playing those games is pretty minimal now.
The other big expense, for a gamer like me, is attending gaming conventions. I go to three to five gaming conventions a year, all outside of my local area. Conventions require you to buy a badge to attend, and may charge extra for playing specific games. But, the bigger expense is a hotel room for three to five nights, plus gasoline, meals, etc. When I attend the “big” convention which I go to every year, I’m in a hotel for five nights (though I’m nearly always sharing the room with one or two friends), and that trip alone costs me at least $500 to $700.
My “other” hobby is model trains. I’d had trains when I was a kid, and got back into it during COVID. I collect N scale trains (1:160 scale), which are fairly small, but that tends to also make them somewhat expensive. A locomotive runs from $150 to $500, freight cars $20 to $30 each, passenger cars from $20 to $50, plus the cost of track, scenery, etc. I’ve bought a fair amount, which is all in plastic storage tubs right now, with the thought that, at some point, I’ll build a permanent model railroad; for now, I take some of the trains out, and set up a temporary loop to run trains for an afternoon.
I guess I didn’t word that well - wasn’t trying to put you down or how you woodwork. If I had the time, I would get more into non-electric woodworking and would spend money on getting that equipment. Maybe after I retire. Woodworking is something I love and 8 hours can fly by as I “zen out”. I love creating usable things and my wife loves putting in orders for those usable things.
I have got one little heated propagator with LED growlight, but I think it costs under £20 a year to run. Not checked in a while, and it’s tricky to calculate as I have solar panels which often give me free power in the middle of the day. I guess there’s a couple of bags of compost in the mix too, but I rarely buy more than 2-3 bags at about £2.50 each per year, so it’s not a major cost.
Hunting down cheap plants is practically another hobby in its own right for me. When I started gardening I was on an extremely tight budget, and aesthetics were not all that relevant as it was an allotment site where I had to grow mainly edibles, so I’ve been doing all the cheap options since I started. I could afford to spend more now, but I still get a kick from hunting down a bargain, or growing something from seeds or cuttings.
Most of the plants you can buy at the big stores here are imported and not as healthy as they look anyway, having just been taken from a heated glashouse somewhere in the Netherlands, stuck in transit for 2-3 days and then put on the shelf. They look immaculate, but they often don’t do well when planted out up here in Scotland and exposed to our weather. I’ll spend at a local nursery if they grow unusual stuff themselves, but it’s rare I get the chance to visit any.
Is that a TD? It’s even the right color.
Well, my guitar rack has only 5 slots, and that’s the limit for bass guitars allowed in this house, so no more guitars for a while.
As far as proper “hobbies”…
Currently I am into film photography and have a darkroom where I develop my prints. This is surprisingly inexpensive: the most expensive component is the enlarger, and that can be had on Craig’s List or similar if you are willing to shop for a used one and know what to look for. I bought mine new to avoid the uncertainty, and paid $1200 or so for it.
The rest of the gear is all eBay and a few hundred here and there…grain focuser, negative carrier, easel, fancy timer, trays, glassware, tongs, and so forth.
In the other side of the basement I have a full machine shop that has about $20k worth of machine tools and associated accessories. I feel terrible because I haven’t made any little steam engines in years. The project I started over the Pandemic is all machined but awaiting final fitting and assembly.
Now for the real hobby: YouTube.
I love making YouTube videos about the various other hobbies; mostly film photography. Yesterday I did one showing how to do a proper setup of the Fender JMJ Mustang Bass.
In this business there is always yet one more piece of gear!
Example: Earlier this year I found an excellent pro Rode shotgun mic used at Guitar Center and combined it with a thing called an ART VoiceChannel tube channel strip–an awesome rack-mount gadget that makes your voice sound like a million bucks, and does it straight into the camera.
I sooth my conscience by saying I bought it all used.
That’s the kind of stuff I waste my extra cash on.
No offense taken. I really do miss fooling around in my shop. Just running a plane over a piece of wood was relaxing. I also made planter boxes for our garden, and some with steel hangers to hang over the deck railings. It’s a very satisfying hobby.
I’m switching from round wounds to flat wounds on my Mustang and will need to do a setup. I’ve done setups on my guitars and one of my basses, but I’m always interested in learning more. Do you have a link? BTW, I learned about using an iPad for music from one of your videos and that is what I do now when performing with my group. I used to fumble with a gazillion printed pages that I could barely read (old guy alert) and now I flip through all those pages with my foot!
It is! Of my hobbies, woodworking is the most “zen”. And that is with loud tools that can take off fingers. I look forward to it with more quiet tools. I’ll always need some loud ones though. I have hearing protection with built-in speakers so I can listen to music while I avoid cutting off fingers.
Here you go: JMJ Mustang Bass Setup: A Simple, No-Nonsense 4-Step Guide
Did you do the strings yet? I have a “replace the factory flats with La Bellas” video that I haven’t gotten around to posting, figuring folks probably don’t want to see two bass videos in a row like that.
That’s so cool! Glad to have helped out, and thanks for the kind words.
I recently had to replace both of our ancient iPads because between iOS upgrades and forScore upgrades they were getting laggy. My wife’s iPad lagged 3 seconds on a page turn one day at church and she was done with it. Now we have the latest iPad Pro with the Pencil Pro and it’s all puppy dogs and rainbows again.
Yep, it’s a TD. And it’s the original paint so it better be the right color. 
It has some paint and rust issues but it is almost all original. It does show its age, but I don’t plan on restoring it. I like it the way it is. It has character.
Though now I work from home mainly, and our family supermarket trips rarely coming in at under 100lbs (lots of mouths to feed), so nowadays it definitely counts as a hobby for me not a functional means of transport. I will occasionally cycle/train to work and pop into the supermarket (there is a nice kosher market next to one of the trails I ride), but it’s not preventing any car journeys unfortunately.
I can’t say I have one specific hobby. I have a few things that I do regularly, but my attention/obsession sort of wax and wane over time.
That said, the ones that keep coming back up are photography, gardening, cooking, mixology/amateur bartending, curing/smoking meat (i.e. barbecue and making stuff like ham/bacon/sausage), and computer games.
All of them are pretty much as expensive as you choose to make them. You can go nuts with all of them, or you can just sort of casually do it. I fall somewhere in between; for example, I also shoot film, but I’m not interested in home developing or printing. I tend to get secondhand stuff- I don’t have to have the latest whiz-bang mirrorless camera- I’ve got two DSLRs and a film SLR along with six lenses, and only one of the camera bodies and two of the lenses were bought new.
Cooking/curing/smoking/mixology is much the same way; we got some good All-Clad cookware and mid-level knives for our wedding almost 20 years ago, so the vast majority of our expenditures there are on ingredients, and we’re not the silly types who get all weird about exactly which canned Italian tomatoes we use for pizza sauce, or even if they’re Italian at all. Same with the rest; I’m not above using Gordon’s gin or Evan Williams bourbon in most mixed drinks because once you mix it with all the other stuff, you can’t really tell. That said, I wouldn’t do that in an Old Fashioned, but in a Manhattan, the majority of the nuance of the better whiskey is going to be lost.
I’m replacing with La Bellas! Maybe I should wait till you put out that video 
They have that ribbon wound portion and I’m not quite sure how to deal with them.
It was a game changer for my playing. We started playing a dozen’ish songs and my printed pages were “ok”. But we quickly expanded and the printed pages couldn’t keep up. Your video helped me figure out how to keep up. I started off without the bluetooth page turner, but when I added that, it made things so much better.
I’d like to see that video. I just asked about using an iPad for music in the ongoing guitar thread.
I forgot about Pickleball. I play nearly every day. I go through two or three pairs of court shoes a year so that’s about $300. Another $20-30 for balls and $35 in Pickleball club dues. So less than $400 a year. Make it $600 if I treat myself to a new paddle.