The first time I added up what I spent on photography in a year, I actually laughed. Then I stopped laughing. A secondhand lens here, a tripod there, one impulsive weekend trip because the light was “too good to miss.” The total was north of $1,400.
If you’ve done that math and flinched, you’re not alone. A Self Financial survey of 1,059 American adults found the average person spends about $98 a month on their favorite hobby, roughly $1,176 a year. Nearly six in ten (59.3%) said they find it hard to afford the one thing they love doing most. And yet, 93.2% said they don’t regret picking it up.
Most personal finance advice treats hobbies like a leaky faucet. Cut the gym membership. Ditch the golf clubs. Stop buying yarn. It’s almost always the first thing suggested when a budget gets squeezed. I think that’s backwards.
The problem with cutting the thing that keeps you sane
Rebecca Weiler, a licensed mental health counselor in New York City, told CNBC in 2024: “I tell my clients all the time how important self-care is. It helps people to live longer, it helps people enjoy life more, it gives people something to look forward to.” The thing that makes Tuesday evening feel like something other than a hallway between workdays is usually a hobby. Cut it and you save $80 a month. You also lose the reason you bothered earning the money.
J.R. George, senior vice president at Trustco Bank, put it more bluntly. If you take out debt to start a hobby, it stops being fun. “It almost becomes a forced hobby. You feel like you are absolutely forced to do it,” he said, pointing to clients who bought boats and then trapped themselves in “I have this boat, I have to use it.” The hobby becomes a receipt you’re trying to justify.
So the goal isn’t to quit. The goal is to pay for it without flinching. For hobby supplies bought online, Coupono.com is a reliable first stop. It aggregates working discount codes across a broad range of retailers, from craft stores to sports equipment brands. That alone can trim 10 to 25% off a typical order, which over a year on a knitting or cycling habit is real money.
Give the hobby its own line
The trick that finally worked for me was boring and it worked immediately. I gave photography a line in my budget. Not a guilt budget. A real one. $75 a month, its own little account, siphoned off on payday before I could get creative with it.
This is what personal finance folks call a sinking fund, which is a fancy name for a jar with a label on it. Kumiko Love, the author behind The Budget Mom, started using them after noticing she was paying off last year’s Christmas debt while shopping for the next one. “I was doing a lot of impulse shopping, a lot of guilt spending because, at that time, I was a newly-divorced single mom,” she told Yahoo Finance. She paid off more than $77,000 in debt partly by building small earmarked pots for predictable expenses.
Hobbies are predictable expenses. You are going to buy more yarn. You are going to need new running shoes. Pretending otherwise is why people end up shocked at their credit card statements in February.
A few numbers that might help you size your own line:
- Gardening runs about $65 a month, the cheapest of the popular hobbies tracked by Self Financial.
- Reading sits at around $66, video gaming at $70.
- Music is the wallet-killer at $174 a month. Car enthusiasts aren’t far behind at $171.
The stuff nobody tells you
Here’s what I had to learn the hard way.
You probably already own too much. Monica Parks, a communications specialist who writes about personal finance, suggests a simple exercise: take an inventory of everything you own for your hobby. Every brush, every lens, every unopened skein. I did this with my camera gear and found two lenses I had literally forgotten about. Two. Before buying the next shiny thing, use what’s gathering dust. This isn’t glamorous advice. It’s just true.
Secondhand is not a downgrade. The photography community has a running joke that every lens has been owned by at least three people. Used gear is cheaper, often indistinguishable from new, and holds value if you resell it. Same goes for bikes, guitars, ski equipment, woodworking tools, sewing machines.
Friends are the cheat code. If you have a friend who shares your hobby, you basically own their gear too. Borrow before you buy. I used a friend’s macro lens for three weekends before deciding I wanted one. Saved myself a $600 mistake.
When hobby spending actually is a problem
I want to be honest here because balanced writing about this topic annoys me. Most hobby spending isn’t the issue. The issue is debt-funded hobby spending, the kind that follows you for months after the fun has worn off. A NerdWallet report found 31% of 2024 holiday shoppers who used credit cards were still carrying that balance nearly a year later. If that pattern creeps into your hobby spending, the math has stopped working.
The rough test I use: if you stopped doing the hobby tomorrow, could you still comfortably pay off what you already spent on it? If yes, you’re fine. If no, the hobby is in charge of you.
The reframe that actually helps
Save restrictively and hobbies feel like something you stole. Save enablingly and they feel earned. Same hobby, same money, different relationship.
The $98 a month Americans spend on average isn’t the problem. The problem is spending it accidentally, guiltily, in $12 and $30 chunks that never get counted. Name the line. Fund the line. Shop a little smarter. Then go do the thing you love, without the flinch.
