Actual Wages -- Backwards

You might already have figured your actual wages, using both your actual time (work plus time you spend on work) and your actual pay (not including taxes, and subtracting expenses you wouldn't have without your job, including indirect expenses like vacations and "costuming").

But here's a twist: try it for your hobbies.

Take your favorite recreational activity and evaluate both the actual time you spend on it and the actual cost. Try to consider all the indirect costs of time and money, too.

Let's examine an example: video gaming. Suppose that every month or so, our gamer spends fifty dollars on a new game. Let's also suppose that she plays it every day for an hour, or about thirty hours per game. Simply take the dollar amount of total dollars spent over total time spent in hours, and you'll get $1.67/hr, something roughly comparable to an hourly wage. (At least, it has the same units, if not the same semantics.)

Or try another one: watching television. Suppose you watch three hours per day of television, or about ninety hours per month. And suppose that you have a thirty-dollar cable susbcription. This works out to a tentative cost of $.33/hr.

However, there might be more to this. For many of us, watching television and its associated advertisements leads us directly to additional spending. If in watching television, you are induced to spend a hundred dollars each month that you wouldn't have otherwise spend—this is not an unreasonable assumption—your actual cost suddenly jumps to $4.30/hr.

The point of figuring out the actual cost of hobbies is not primarily to choose between options. Your hobbies should be dictated by what you love, by your passions, not by choosing the cheapest one out there. Instead, use this information as an incentive to make better use of your hobbies.

To make a hobby more cost-effective, you really have two ways to handle it—either spend more time on it, or spend less money on it.