But What Now?

How many of you have a hobby you would love to spend more time doing? Raise your hands! I’ve got my hand way up in the air. I’d like to spend more time doing this. Since I am not yet retired, my hobbies need to wait until after work. Since writing helps me to relieve some of that stress of my workday, this is a perfect hobby for me.

Hobbies are wonderful because just about anything can be considered a hobby. Wikipedia has a pretty informative entry for hobby describing the origin of the word and elaborating on hobby category groups such as collecting, games, outdoor recreation and creative hobbies.

The American Heritage dictionary simply defines a hobby as

An activity or interest pursued outside one’s regular occupation and engaged in primarily for pleasure.

I’m all for that! Give me more (time, that is).

Some of the things I plan to do when I retire is take a photography class, play my guitar, take more pictures around the city, spend more time in the garden, maybe even pull out my watercolors from a class I took a couple of years ago. I also collect wine corks and cat beanie babies. I’m not sure yet what to do with either of those collections, but I think the corks must have some potential.

There are hobbies and then there are things your significant other wants you to take up as hobbies. My gardening hobby, for instance, includes all that weeding I’ll have time to do. Fortunately for me and my significant other, I actually enjoy weeding for limited amounts of time. I wouldn’t want to earn money doing it several hours a day, though.

I’ve recently purchased an ebook on how to earn money from your hobbies, called Hobby For Profit by Dave Harber and Antonio Thornton. I recommend it highly if you actually have hobbies more interesting than weeding to earn some extra income. You may not get rich, but it would be a way to help fund your hobby at least. From my list above, I would love to earn money from my photography hobby. I’m not so sure I’m going to start hitting open mikes with my guitar in hand at this point in my life, but, hey you just never know!