Spending Money on Hobbies

I am writing this on the couch, and my cat Vesper is all over me. She doesn’t like to let me work.

Two weeks ago, I learned that the new model of CDJs was being released by Pioneer. Some background: I am a DJ, and when you are DJing, you have two turntables and a mixer. In the old days, these used to be vinyl records, but then they evolved to CDs and then to USB drives. “CDJ” refers to the turntables. So, the ones I had were the CDJ-2000NXS2, which came out in 2016 or so, and the new ones are the CDJ-3000X. A significant upgrade. The morning they were released, I ordered two of them at $2,999 apiece.

They arrived, and I plugged them in—and one of them didn’t work. Wouldn’t power on. So, I ordered a third one, shipped the other one back, and this past weekend, I was looking forward to spending all weekend playing music on my new gear.

Except Saturday morning, when I started playing, my right speaker and booth monitor didn’t work. I traced the problem to the mixer, whose right channel had stopped working. Now I had to buy a new mixer, the DJM-A9, for $2,899. Meaning, in the span of two weeks, I dropped about $9,000 on my hobby.

The Right Amount to Spend on Your Hobby

Which raises an interesting question: How much are you allowed to spend on your hobby? I don’t think I covered this in my book No Worries, but I do have an answer to this question. The right amount to spend on your hobby is: infinity! As long as you don’t go into debt. The purpose of money is to make you happy, so if you have a hobby that makes you happy, you should spend lots of money on it.

I would rather spend $9,000 on DJ gear than:

• Going on vacation

• A series of $400 dinners out

• Cars

• A Brioni suit

• Etc.

It doesn’t matter what your hobby is. Horses. Guinea pigs. Motorcycles. Fishing. Skiing. 

Skiing in particular—if you are serious about skiing, get the best skis, the best bindings, the best boots, and the best poles. If you don’t, you are doing yourself a disservice. You are going to be a top-level skier skiing on crappy gear? That doesn’t make any sense. You are going to produce music? Get the modular synths. Get all the plugins. Get everything. That is, if you are serious about it. If you are a dilettante, then maybe you can buy the cheap guitar.

One Caveat

That brings me to an important concept: I have never regretted spending money. I have only regretted not spending money.

You ever walk into some apparel retailer and see a jacket that you really like, and the jacket is a little expensive, and you’re like, Ah, I don’t need the jacket, and you walk out of the store and go home? Well, what are you thinking about? The jacket! You wish you had bought it. You think about driving back to the store, but you can’t bring yourself to. So, you’re miserable. You had the money, you could have had the jacket, it wouldn’t have been a big stretch, and now you regret it.

Now, a caveat here. Some people, obviously, take this to an extreme. I would modify the above statement: I have never regretted spending money, as long as I don’t go into debt.

If you are going to end up financing the jacket, then buying the jacket is a bad idea. If you are going to end up financing the skis on a credit card, then the skis are a bad idea. But again, the amount of money that you can spend on your hobby is infinite. Especially if you are good at it.

I know a talented guitar player here in the Myrtle Beach area. He gigs all over the place and teaches guitar at the university. He even provided the music for the conference reception I had earlier this year. Musicians don’t make a lot of money, but I would be surprised if he didn’t have a collection of very expensive guitars. Most of these guys just plow all the money they make at gigs back into their hobby, which is entirely appropriate.

The one exception to this might be dressage. If you are going to be doing dressage, you should probably be a billionaire or have a spouse who is a billionaire. All those dressage athletes you see in the Olympics are all billionaires. That is a very expensive hobby. And Jay Leno has a very expensive car collection. He can afford it. If you can afford it, you should do it.

And just as I was finishing this newsletter, Vesper got off the couch and went to bother someone else.

Jared Dillian, MFA