The house itself; I don’t fix things that aren’t actually broken. We bought back what was my wife’s “old family place” circa 1900. It was not well built or maintained and I should have basically just rebuilt it from the ground up at the start but I didn’t. As a result it eats furnaces, roofs, windows, paint, water lines, my sanity ----------------
Even with serious basic care, it is what it is and will never get any better. And now as I’m getting older and can’t do as much by myself, its starting that downward slide. Yes, I could go back and do what should have been done from the beginning but paying someone else to do the work would be another $100k or so and the end result would still be basically a $30k house.
I spend money on stuff, but am not “throwing good money after bad” which is an important part of the definition of the phraser Money Pit. YMMV.
I have a Man Toy Budget in my head and I try to not add to it. I collected First Editions for years, then transitioned the budget over to old guitars, with increases in book value enabling me to build a bigger guitar budget - yay, exactly how I want that stuff to work!
I have a small number very dear guitars that take up most of my Toy Budget - but I play the heck out of them, so I felt I have thrown good money at my desire to have good tools for my interests. Yay!
From my childhood days (I was born in 1960) up to 2007, it was comic books. Also, from about 2002 to 2007, I collected medieval-style weaponry (replicas) like axes, spears, and swords. After that, it has been “Cthulhu Mythos” books and anthologies, and “superheroines-in-KO-peril”-themed commissioned artworks. Eating out a lot at fast food restaurants also drains the money away…
Honestly, at least with my big adventure bike, the $ per mile is probably about a wash. Over the 30k I’ve ridden it, it’s taken probably 7 or 8 rear tires, 3 or 4 fronts, 2 chains, a set of sprockets, maybe 10 oil changes, 5 valve adjustments, front and rear brake pads, and other miscellaneous tinkering. It gets about 60% better gas mileage than my Subaru (50ish versus 30) but over the same 30k miles all the Subie needed was 4 oil changes and is maybe closing in on needing some tires soon. With current fuel prices, the bike saved about $700 on gas, but I’m sure it ate up more than that in maintenance. Especially if I didn’t do all my own work on it.
(Granted, more modern touring-oriented bikes have less intensive maintenance schedules. Plus for me the real killer is the more aggressive on/off road rear tires only last about 3-4k miles tops. I have occasionally put on less aggressive rubber which lasts about twice as long.)
The BIG big target is a pro contract and shoe endorsement deal. Which could lead to a few movie parts, then finally a sit com that runs for many years. Then of course you host a talk show.
Racing. Last year I did nine races. Since almost all of them are for charity, entry fees aren’t cheap. Then there were the 11 hotel nights & two plane tickets + gas, tolls, train tix, & food to add to the mix as only four of them were within 100 miles of where I live.
Until a few weeks ago I would have said my boat. It is a 35 foot cruiser with a 12 foot beam that sleeps 6. Two weeks ago, I signed up with a service to use my boat as a charter (Any interested boat owners here, PM me for more information). The boating season hasn’t even started yet, and I already have a few renters lined up for May/June. For the first time ever, it seems I will make more from owning a boat than I spend on it.
Now, I’d have to say it’s my wife. More than 20 years and at least a million dollars on. Man, I’ll never get that money back… and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Under your definition of money pit, definitely scuba diving and more accurately, the costs associated with getting to and staying at places worth diving.
But for me, a dive trip means a week unplugged from daily life and many hours underwater doing something that I love to do. It’s deeply satisfying, in a way that makes me look forward to spending money for the experience. I don’t subscribe to your definition of a money pit. A money pit is something that you throw money into with regret.
Trading dollars for time spent doing things that truly make you happy is the opposite of a money pit. That’s the absolute best thing you can spend money on and considering it a money pit is a counterproductive attitude. When I pay for my dive vacations, I don’t regret the money I’m spending. I think about how fortunate I am to be able to pay for something completely impractical that I love to do.
On previewing my own post, it sounds a bit preachy and “daily affirmation”-ish. That wasn’t my intent. But seriously, don’t regret money spent in the pursuit of happiness unless it’s not actually bringing you happiness.
It sounds to me like you’re getting a pretty good return for your money. As long as you’re spending within your means, be thankful that you’ve found something worth doing that’s important to you.
This is a great attitude, and is why I keep spending the money to travel. I always take my family along, too, as well as my mother on occasion (which adds to the cost), but we all love it.
My son and I loving scuba diving, too. We’ve only done 10 dives so far, though. I’d like to get more training, more gear, and go for a week-long dive trip someplace in the tropics sometime.
This is the $64,000 question for me: are we truly spending within our means? While we do take on some debt for a big vacation, it’s generally paid off within a few months. That said, maybe we should be putting money into the house instead, or saving more for retirement. So I worry about this sometimes.
Definitely travel, I take two or three holidays a year. It broadens the mind (and keeps mine sane) so I don’t consider it a cost, as such. Also I want to see places - and photograph them - before they’ve been totally McDonald’sified and while I’m young enough to go there.
Eh, yes and no. Compared to the time I put into a project, I regard the cost of the wood as almost negligible. Especially because, like many woodworkers, I have a tendency to pick up wood whenever I find a piece (or price) I like, so a lot of the time, the wood is already a sunk cost. A local cabinet shop used to have a trailer of cut-offs and discards at 50% or better discounts, so I have a garage full of short stuff that would be excellent for cutting boards. So if someone asked for a cutting board, I’d be happy to get the wood a good home, but my weekends are valuable to me, so $35.00 wouldn’t even be enough to pay me to walk out to the garage if I didn’t want to give you a cutting board.
I do have a tiny sailboat, and the cost/hour of sailing, as someone else noted, is just appalling when you consider mooring fees, club fees, registration, and maintenance.
Photography can run into some serious money as well – not just the equipment and lenses, but, if you display your work, the printing and framing runs into serious money. And very, very few people buy photography due to the “it’s beautiful, but I could probably take the same picture myself” phenomenon.
