Financially, when does spending on a hobby become crazy?

I have a number of hobbies that come with very different price tags. We have a sports car – that’s expensive in annual depreciation, insurance, and repairs. We like to travel, but flights, hotels, and sightseeing also add up quickly. Activities? Softball costs money, curling costs money, and the tennis club costs money in the winter.

Those hobbies cost thousands over the course of a year. Still, they don’t seem as crazy as the $50 that I just spent on 3 LEGO bricks as part of my project to ‘restore’ these 4 sets I’ve had since I was a kid. A simple gray antenna for a spaceship, a old ‘POLICE’ sign, and a green custom baseplate that hasn’t been made in decades.

Typically, LEGO bricks only cost about 10 cents a piece when you are buying them new, but when it comes to vintage LEGO – rare specialty parts that haven’t been made in decades – you spend a pretty penny on the secondary market. In this case, I spent 166x the cost of an average brick for these three.

I’ve been gradually rebuilding these 1970s sets over the last few years. I had saved 90% of the original bricks from my childhood, but some were lost or broken over time. I decided my January project would be to finish these sets off right. I put my orders in this weekend and now just to have to wait for the parcel post. In addition to these three parts, I have about a dozen more parts coming.

Even though a $50 isn’t that much in the whole scheme of things, it still seems crazy to pay so much for just a few plastic bricks.

Nonetheless, I did it. Call me crazy, it’s fine.

Regardless of how much, what’s the craziest spend you’ve put into a hobby?

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