Between work, your other responsibilities, and the time spent seeing your friends and family, it might feel as though there’s little left to focus on what you want to do concerning your hobbies. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that some of these hobbies require money to go towards them to meet their full potential – money that might be hard to come by when it’s difficult to justify not spending it in areas you deem more important.
However, luxuries might be more important than you think, and if they’re especially important to you, it might be time to figure out how you can make room in your schedule and budget for them.
Within Your Budget
The first question that you might have might be the more pertinent one – how do you find the money for this? If your hobby is something like gaming, where devices like consoles and VR headsets can be rather expensive, the decision to take some money out of your savings and towards something like this might not be one to take lightly.
In this case, you might think of taking on extra work. This might come in the form of shipping work where you can bid on work to gauge the amount that you need, and using this, you can begin to form a financial plan around these luxuries. Alternatively, you could examine your budget and temporarily move around funds to make room for it for a month or two – as long as those changes are realistic and not too detrimental.
Within Your Schedule
However, solving one problem might simply make the other even worse. If you’re struggling to find both money and time for these luxuries, the former might be fixed by taking on extra work, but that could then simply restrict your available time further. When it comes to finding time in your schedule for your hobbies, it might be about accepting that the ideal opportunities might not be as regular as you want them to be, but it could also be about rearranging your time to make room for yourself.
If every weekend is spent socialising, for example, consider the importance of spending some time in your own company, to allocate towards your hobbies and your relaxation.
One-Off Luxuries
However, it could be that what you mean by luxuries doesn’t pertain at all to hobbies and is simply about doing something nice, such as a meal at a restaurant, drinks out with friends, a short holiday, or some new clothes. These might sometimes come down to recognising when to simply treat yourself, but that can be difficult when it’s tough to predict the consequences that any given purchase will have on your finances down the road.
It might be, if you’re struggling to feel comfortable doing this but still finding yourself wanting to, that limiting yourself to one luxury within any given period can help you to mitigate it, keeping things in control without denying yourself any rewards.
