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.
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.
You sound like my friend. She owns multiple editions of the same books because there was a fancy cover but then the books had matching covers with related books but oh look they made an illustrated edition!
My wife and I have a room with an entire wall full of books, more in numerous bookcases around the house, and a couple boxes of books that aren’t on shelves. They’re mostly bought second hand on eBay, dirt cheap. Reading is cheap. Collecting pristine/fancy copies is expensive.
You start at the library… then you read a series they only have the first 2 of and fall in love.
So you need to buy the third one somewhere… then you have a choice to make, do you really buy JUST the third of a series? May as well just buy the box set…
Only because no one has said it yet, headphones. You can get a really great set of headphones for $200 or so, but if you want it to sound a little better you’re looking at $500-$700. But music can sound a bit better if you get better equipment for around $1200. Then you hear a $2000 set-up, and you chase that, until you hear a $5000 kit. And it just keeps going.
Wait until you get a fishing buddy, and you start gifting him tackle. Then a few days later you realize that hey you miss that rod you had, so you decide to buy another, but now they’re like an extra $100 then they used to be. So you pick up ot at work but now your whole week is thrown off, and you can’t find the motivation to go down to bass pro, buy a rod, reel, and line and tackle because you’ve worked 70 hours this week, and you figure it’ll be best to wait until next week to do it.
Next week rolls around but car registration is due and you decide to use your hobby budget instead break into your savings. Now you’re back where you started. To make matters worse the guy you gifted the rod to isn’t into fishing anymore.
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.
Started with a $200 wheel and pedals setup, now my rig is worth we’ll over $2.5k and is basically top of the line. Upgraded parts one at a time over the last few years and it’s now as good as it gets.
Photography has me slowly upgrading lenses and eventually a new camera body. Just upgraded to a 200-500 F5.6 lens the other week for when I’m going to shoot the Daytona 24 this coming January.
but, nobody gets into simracing and photography thinking they are cheap hobbies, do they? I mean, sure you can get a start with a low budget but everybody knows the really nice toys are $$$
True, but they started inexpensive. Most everything can be done with a few hundred bucks of hardware in both fields. It’s only when you want to get into the really high end stuff that it gets expensive. My $300 used Nikon D3500 works phenomenally for almost everything, and that’s true for most entry level gear.
It gets close, but it’s more about the competition. I’m not a real race car driver, nor will I be in the future, so I’m not chasing 100% realism.
You lose the seat of the pants feel, but there’s been a good amount of improvements to hardware over the last few years that have really increased the fidelity of it.
Flight simming. Started out with a cheap joystick. Now I have an expensive one, throttle quadrants, rudder pedals, a vr headset and I’ve built myself a button box and a flight seat. And I’m now I want a helicopter collective. Oh well…
Aircraft, scenery, support software like Navigraph, it all adds up. Fortunately aircraft and scenery are “buy it for life” and anyone who tries otherwise is liable to have rocks thrown at them.
VATSIM is free however, and that’s part of why it’s so great.
Knitting. Super cheap to start, you can pick up a set of needles and some acrylic yarn for under $20. But when you start getting into nice yarns and bigger pieces, you are spending hundreds of dollars on yarn alone for a blanket or a sweater. And you want nice needles in all sizes as well as all types (double pointed, regular and circular)… more hundreds of dollars.
Moral of the story is if a friend knits you something with nice yarn, please appreciate it. Lots of effort and thought went into it.
I really, really love knitting. I’m not good, and I have a hard time finishing projects (tragic case of batterscain. I jump from thing to thing.), but the actual knitting itself? OMG, I love having something to do with my hands, and that something actual makes a real, tangible thing? Somehow magically out of a ball of string? What‽ It’s lovely.
It’s insane, though, how people who don’t knit/crochet will just treat a knitted or crocheted item like it’s a cheap Walmart graphic tee. They do not respect the work put into it.
Yeah. I knitted gorgeous socks and scarves in hand-dyed merino for some good friends. Come Christmas they obviously thought, oh MrsDoyle likes knitting, let’s get her something knitting related! A selection of the cheapest, nastiest acrylic in hideous colours and some needles. Oooooh. Thank you so much.
Ouch… Yeah. As a general rule of thumb, if I’m buying someone something craft related it’s either because I know enough about the craft to get them something truly nice, or I get them a gift card to their favorite craft related place. Outside of that, I’ll just ask them what they want. Lol. I enjoy a bunch of different crafts, including wood working. A friend once got me a set of chisels when they found out I liked wood working. … They were plastic with just the very ends being metal, and would break if you looked at the harshly. Lol. The thought behind it was sweet, but they had no idea what they were doing. Lol.
The story had a bit of a happy ending - I paired the yarn and needles with a “learn to knit” book, and donated it to a raffle a club I belong to was holding. The winner of the kit was thrilled!
We’ve been discussing the need to get some of our yarn to a new home. There’s so much, and it’s just never going to be used as there’s just literally too much.
Oh yes. Yes. I went to the Edinburgh Yarn Festival a few years back. I live nearby, but met people there who’d come from all over - Europe, Japan, the US. All three days sold out. The yarns were so beautiful! And oh so expensive. But you were there in person, fan-girling with you favourite dyers and pattern designers! Spend spend spend. The nearest cash machine ran dry. Such an expensive hobby. But I can’t stop.
I’ve found my people… as I cry into this shawl project on my lap, of merino fingering yarn I paid to have imported because “you want to support small yarn producers” telling myself, “it’s not soft enough. Just throw it away and buy that cashmere/silk blend that you know feels like butter.” 🫠
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