Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
3d printing.
Started out with a cheap printer, mostly to supply my friends with miniatures and terrain. They loved the stuff I printed for them, so gave me money for my effort, which went into upgrading my printer and buying more supplies and buying a new printer so I could print better, bigger things for them.
Then, so enamored by what 3d printing could do, they bought their own 3d printers.
and now no one talks to me cause I no longer have any use and i’m stuck with a printer I havent even removed from the box and assembled for 3 years, and another printer that only stays around because every 2-3 months something comes up where I can design and print a part to fix something around the house.
I think audio, headphones, amps, all this stuff. Microphones, recorders, physical mixing gear. If I would go in that direction, I would need a seperate room and loots of money
Have you tried playing table tennis? It starts tame, but as soon as you get a bit competitive and learn about custom rackets…
I just drained my bank account last weekend for a new racket and box, a few new balls,…
Cycling. I started with a bike that was given to me by my uncle. Now I have a road bike, full equipment x3, a direct drive trainer for the rainy days and a subscription to use that.
Hunting. When I was younger, poorer man I used a hand me down lever action rifle and a $5 orange vest to fill my freezer with cheap venison that I would butcher myself. for less than $100 in licenses, ammo and packaging material I could put 3 or 4 deer in the freezer in 1 weekend.
Now, I have multiple gun safes full of various guns, all of them to serve “different purposes” like long range, brush gun, restricted weapons hunting areas, slug gun restricted areas, hunting shotguns, competition shot guns. Then there’s the hunting gear, knifes, packs, laser range finders, reloading equipment, hunting lease payments, guide fees, out of state application fees.
Last year I shot 1 deer and paid $140 to have someone else butcher it for me.
I’d like to get into hunting. I’m getting my firearm license in a couple weeks. Going to get hunting license and plan to start soonest. Any advice for someone starting out?
Get with a friend or family member who knows what they are doing and follow them around. You can look into dedicated hunting groups but that can be hit or miss. It’s usually not hard to find a group dedicated to helping kids, women or veterans to get out and hunt, but if you are a grown man there’s not much options.
Surprised there’s no reef tank people here. Imagine spending $5000 on a 20 gallon fish tank - BEFORE spending any money on corals.
Ya it CAN be done for $50, but nobody does that.
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Coffee for sure, never saw myself owning a $300 coffee grinder a few years ago…
Smart phones and headphones aren’t exactly cheap but, I have built a bit of an expensive hobby around collecting them lol
Gardening.
Containers are surprisingly expensive. And you need a lot of soil to fill them, which gets expensive too. Then it’s impossible to only buy the seeds you need, when there are so many cool varieties…
Game collecting
What started out as picking up C64, Atari, and Nintendo games in the 80s and 90s has turned into a collection of thousands of games totalling tens of thousands of dollars…
Believe it or not, self-hosting! I went from renting a VPS for $40 a month, to purchasing an entire $150 machine at home, plus $50 or so in additional storage, plus a $20 a month VPS solely to bypass NAT restrictions… plus a few hundred dollars more when I first started, because I cheaped out on components and managed to brick not one, but two Intel BIOSes trying to update them.
My grandma got me 3 ducklings in 2019 for no reason. 3 ducks don’t cost very much. The issue is, that she unlocked a passion. I now have 12 ducks. I want more, but I don’t have the money or space.
Magnet fishing.
I bought a kit that included a reasonably sized 360° magnet, rope, grappling hook and protective cover for about £120 thinking that it would be good enough to keep me satisfied for a while.
After my first trip out and having to carry a load of scrap metal about a mile back to the car, I bought a cart for £80 so I could cart it all back instead. After having to use my car to pull my magnet out of the harbour on Saturday I’ve bought a cheap winch and a tow rope to anchor it to things for £25 for when it gets stuck somewhere I can’t use my car.
And of course I wanted a bigger magnet almost immediately, but I’ve managed to hold off on that so far. Saying that it’s fairly likely I will get an upgrade from Bondi magnets when the site launches as long as the price is competitive with Magnetar (I suspect it’s a partnership and the magnets will be identical, but we’ll see)
I got into theater lighting in high school & college. Years after graduating and getting a “real” job I discovered a bunch of all volunteer community theaters in the towns around me. I started doing lighting design, and over time amassed a bunch of my own gear. I’ve also gotten a bit of a name for figuring out special effects. In my basement I have a dozen professional LED stage lights, strobe lights, a fog machine & hazer, and a bunch of bins of odds & ends used for various effects.
Reading. Bear with me…you start by getting a cheap physical or digital copy of the book. Then you fall in love with the book/author. Then you have to buy all the books by that author…but not the cheap editions…the fancy editions! You need to display these babies! And oh! They sell cool collectors items that would be perfect for the book shelf! Rinse and repeat for so…so many books. Sigh.
