Hobbies you wish you could afford

Ever had hobbies you wish you could afford? Or hobbies that you managed to start but down the line, realized that you simply did not have deep-enough pockets to afford maintaining it? Have you ever tried starting a hobby you know you’d be very interested in then discovered after doing some research that it was unreasonably expensive or tedious to maintain?

I’ve always been interested in photography. My dad used to own a Nikon FM02 SLR (until I lost it back in high school). I even participated in a photography club when I was in high school. And then just last year, I purchased a Canon 400D for myself. Snapped pics. Looked at other photographers’ works. Tweaked some shots in Photoshop. The usual shebang. Until I started wanting to add more variety to my shots. I slowly realized that for me to get those really awesome, mouth-gaping shots, I needed to buy myself a wider variety of lenses. Apparently, SLR/DSLR lenses are nearly or more often than not, more expensive than the very body of the camera itself.

Building model kits is another hobby I enjoyed on a very basic level back when I was in grade school and high school and only went into it to a more serious degree when I started working. I used to build model kits for my younger cousins from the US who would come over, buy them, ask me to build it for them, then I’ll just hear from their parents that some part broke off while the kids were playing with it back at home. After I ran into Danny-sama’s blog and how he put up a tutorial on building gunpla for lazy or busy people, I started to gain a more serious interest in the hobby. I realized that somehow, I could make my model kits look like those that are posted on the internet. I can paint and detail them and they would look cool. But that was until all the expenses started piling up. If wanted to improve my craft, I needed to purchase and air compressor, and air brush, additional modelling tools and custom decals among other things.

Collecting and reading novels by certain authors is also something I’ve been doing since I was in college. I have a near-complete mainstream collection of Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman’s legendary work in Dragonlance from Dragons of Autumn Twilight all the way to Dragons of the Highlord Skies. I also have a compiled Icewind Dale Trilogy by RA Salvatore, the author who brought us the most beloved drow Drizzt Do’Urden. There’s also the Artemis Fowl series which I have from book 1 to 5. And there are others that I picked up along the way. But if I really wanted to be hardcore about it, I would be buying the hardbound ones, the special editions, the annotated versions (well, I have at least one of them). But they’re expensive as heck too. One special edition hardbound novel is already worth three in a trilogy in paperback.

So really, no hobby comes cheap either with regards to money or time. So what I do instead is remain at entry level and enjoy all of my hobbies simultaneously. I don’t intend to be a leader in any field of it, don’t intend to be an expert in any of those hobbies, but when anyone comes up and talks to me about them, I can go beyond just saying yeah they’re cool.

Do you have any hobbies you have always wanted to do but for some reason cannot?