Surprisingly Frugal Hobbies



Oh no, a listicle!

Boating

A kayak gives you one fixed seating position. The few times I’ve tried it, my ass needed a break within an hour. But I love being on water. A fidget-friendly alternative is inflatable stand-up paddleboarding. I overpaid for mine with REI scrip, but I hear the $200 ones on Scamazon are fine, and they come with a paddle.

photo of paddleboard on a beach

Inflatable means kneeling, sitting, and lying down are all comfy when you tire of standing. (Though if you’re imagining a pool toy, it’s not like that at all. It’s like a very firm, thick-skinned air mattress. Feels nice to stand on barefoot.)

You could get a solid workout by cranking on the paddle, but I also enjoy a gentle meditative float. Drift for a while, hang your feet off the side, get in the water, or lie back on the board and enjoy the clouds. A paddleboard also accommodates two people. For me, the experience is as nice as the kind of boating that amortizes to hundreds of dollars per day on the water – maybe nicer.

photo of feet in water

Importantly: inflatable means you don’t need any of a vehicle, roof racks, or trailer to transport it. The whole thing rolls up and stores in a (large) backpack. You can bring it to water via bicycle (or walking / transit), dry it on a balcony, and store it in a closet.

Startup cost: <$300 for a paddleboard and PFD. Ongoing cost: $0 / transportation.

Gardening

The earth is full of plants and soil just sitting unattended. You can bring them home and watch them grow in any old yogurt cup. Plant knowledge goes infinitely deep: botany builds on biology which builds on organic chemistry. If your plants get sick there’s no expensive veterinarian, and there is no such thing as plant abuse.

Startup cost: $0. Ongoing cost: also $0.

Resistance Training

The science continues to pile up: doing what approximates to ’lifting heavy stuff’ improves your physical health, makes you feel better, and slows multiple processes of aging (such as bone density loss) for those who continue doing it as they get older. The benefits seem even better than cardio workouts like running or cycling (though they complement each other), and it has low injury risk relative to running. There are many different (yet similarly effective) ways to resistance train, and some of them cost approximately free.

My most important piece of fitness equipment is a dead tree copy of Bodyweight Strength Training Anatomy by Bret Contreras, bought on impulse for $24.95. (There might be an even better book that I’m unaware of.) This book teaches you to play a fun game: which muscle groups can I work to exhaustion with only a floor, a table, a chair, and a doorway? The answer turns out to be most of them, especially when you aren’t at a high level of conditioning.

The book shows progressively harder exercises for each part of your body, the equivalent of stacking more plates on the barbell. (You can do 20 push-ups? Now try them with your hands touching in a diamond shape.) Progress is very measurable, so if you like to keep stats, you can watch the line go up over time. You also improve flexibility and balance: skater squats have made me way better at balancing on one foot than I was a few months ago.

Yes, it slowly dawned on me that I’m doing prison workouts. But people get hella fit in prison!

Startup cost: $24.95 for the book. Ongoing cost: $0, though a handful of cheap items (like a pull-up bar that hangs in a doorway) unlock additional exercises.

Fine Writing

There’s a surprising variety of engineering and tactile experience in the world of mostly-but-not-exclusively-Japanese writing instruments and paper. Multi-pens with low-friction ink. Mechanical pencils that internally rotate the lead every time you touch the page, so the point never gets a flat spot. A nice refillable fountain pen. Dotted rule notebooks that you can use as regular lined paper or graph paper to make tables. Brush pens for a painting-like experience without the mess of paint. A $100 trip to a Mai Do or jetpens dot com can get you all of this variety and more. There are certainly more expensive items in this space, but the low end of the market seems to cover most of the variety and quality of experience.

When you aren’t required to hand-write for school anymore, journaling and taking notes on your own terms can bring a joy and clarity of thought that does not come from a glowing rectangle. A paper notebook affords no way to accidentally browse reddit.

Startup cost: <$100. Ongoing cost: pennies per hour writing.

Computer Programming

Nearly any computer will do. Somehow, the worse the computer, the more fun it is. You will encounter its limits sooner, and making a program more resource-efficient is one of the flavors of fun.

Even if your only ‘computer’ is an Android phone, Termux gets you a surprisingly capable Linux user-space environment supporting many programming languages and other tools. It’s easier if you connect a physical keyboard, but you don’t have to.

LLMs make excellent programming tutors, customized to your particular learning goals and style. When they’re wrong, you still benefit from the rubber duck experience. Try some of the less-well-known Chinese labs like Qwen, Kimi, and GLM, all of which host a more capable and generous free tier than the American labs do. You can even ask it “Teach me computer programming” from the very beginning.

Startup cost: $0 with the assumption that you already have a computer if you’re reading this blog. Ongoing cost: also $0.

Cats and Dogs

Private equity firms are buying up all the pet hospitals and coordinating price hikes, setting a trap that soaks pet owners for thousands in their moment of vulnerability. So, the secret to frugal pet interactions is other people’s pets. Walk softly around quiet neighborhoods, and you’ll learn where the friendly cats are. Go commune with them on the sidewalk. Take care of a friend’s dog while they’re away.

Startup cost: $0. Ongoing cost: also $0.

(I’ll disclose, to avoid hypocrisy, that I own a wonderful elderly cat. For most of her life she cost <$1 per day in combined cat food, litter, and veterinary services – an amazing bargain. Now with multiple chronic health issues, she is an expensive kitty. But I am so grateful that she is still around.)

Investing

Actually, never mind. Who the fuck knows these days.

For some people this is the most wasteful hobby, but there is a surprisingly-well-trodden path to becoming a millionaire. The most time-proven, stupid-but-works approach is hitching your wagon to the stock market via low-cost index funds and not selling them during a crash. (This is not investment advice? Is that what I’m supposed to say?)

Others have written about this much more credibly than I am. For a book, see JL Collins’ The Simple Path to Wealth. For a blog/podcast, maybe Mad Fientist? But in very short, if you average out stock market returns over the past century (including the bad years) you get about 10% per year. You can put $20 per month into a broad-based index fund (via broker account, Roth IRA, or whatever) and, at this average rate of return, you could expect $15,000 after 20 years. Compare this to only $5,000 in a low-interest savings account, which would actually lose value due to inflation. (These figures obviously scale with how much you invest – a 10x bigger contribution means a 10x bigger return at a given rate.)

You need to expect at least one market crash (such as the 2008 financial crisis or the 2025 AI bubble popping) in which your shares lose half their value. This could happen any time now. There is also a lot of year-to-year variability behind that 10% number (most years will be worse or better).

It’s also possible that the future won’t look anything like the past and index fund investing stops being a reliable path to long-term wealth. But that was also true 30 or 50 years ago, and it didn’t happen. In the past century, the worst we got were three-ish stagnant decades (2000s, 1970s, and 1930s). Also, many of these possible futures come with other circumstances affecting our lives much more consequentially than investments losing value, so limit your anxiety accordingly.

Startup cost: as little or much as you want. Ongoing cost: ditto but it may be the most frugal hobby of all.

Meetups

Meetups are a meta-hobby that add a social dimension to your other hobbies. Whatever activities you’re into, you can find other people who do them differently in a way that you’ll learn a lot from.

(The term “like-minded” annoys me. Give me the company of minds unlike my own. If you find yourself surrounded by people who 100% agree on every object-level issue, you might all be mistaken about something important. There is a lost art of disagreeing with someone amicably, rather than seeing the conversation as a battle to win, or as intractable folly.)

That particular dot-com website is just one of several places to discover meetups. Meetups are nearly always free.

Startup cost: $0. Ongoing cost: transportation.

Blogging

This isn’t surprisingly frugal but it lets me get even meta-er.

Writing is a skill very improved by practice and exposure to critical feedback. Blogging gets you both of those for free. Any computer that can read a blog can also write one. You’re good to go!

A blog post gives you a vessel to pour curiosity into, and perhaps systematize that curiosity to expand humanity’s knowledge. It’s underappreciated how little it takes to get started as a citizen journalist or lowercase-r researcher.

It’s also underappreciated that there is seldom any punishment for putting your earnest, whole-hearted ideas out on the web, even if they feel silly, even if you are completely wrong. You may anticipate embarrassing your future self, just as the Tumblr you made in middle school would embarrass your present self. This is a good thing: if 2036 you would not be at least a little embarrassed by 2026 you, then you’d have stagnated for a decade. Consider also that:

Seriously, “everyone reads your blog and hates you” is the ~0.000001% outcome. The 99.99% outcome is “a few people read your blog and some of them enjoy or find it useful”.

You don’t even have to have a comments section, with its attendant need to moderate other people’s comments. If someone wants to reply to your post, let them send you an email, or put their response on their own blog.