I know this has been somewhat of a theme lately, but it keeps coming up almost everywhere I go. This one is hardly even related, but it got me thinking and… here we are again!

Why is it that so many people to day have terrible expectations of reality? What was wrong with their home life that got them to where they are today?

Let’s talk about it.

First, as I said, this one is kind of a stretch, I guess. Normally, I would talk about something like this on my other blog, but it’s more of a jumping off point than anything else. I ran into someone on a coin-collecting subreddit, who was complaining that he was “losing money” on his collection. This is clearly someone who entirely misunderstands the entire point of a hobby.

I’ll explain, in short. Hobbies, by their very nature, are things that you do with your spare time and money. They are not meant to make money. They exist to entertain you. They’re there to provide a good time. It is something you do entirely for fun.

Young people these days seem to have a real problem with this. It’s like they can’t even get the concept through their heads. As I’ve said many times, most young people these days, they are fanatically fixated on money, at least if they weren’t raised right, and sadly, a lot of them obviously weren’t. They’ve never had to work for anything. They’ve never had to be responsible. Mommy and daddy always paid, right up until they moved out on their own, and all of a sudden, holy crap, they have to provide for themselves!

So, as I said, a hobby is something that you do for fun. It’s not an investment. It’s entertainment. When you are young and poor, as a lot of people tend to be when they start out, you don’t have a lot of money to spend on hobbies. Welcome to the real world. Growing up, I was collecting stamps and coins and I was just soaking stamps off of mail that came to the door, and hunting through coins in my pocket change. It was a cheap way to get some form of personal entertainment.

Then, when I had a job, some small portion of that income would go toward my hobbies, once all of my other expenses were paid for. My income was always split up into four parts: living expenses, the money that I had to spend to survive; savings, money that I was putting away for the future; investments, money that I was using to make more money; and hobbies, money that I just spent on myself.

Of course, hobbies included more than just stuff that you bought for fun that you stuck in a drawer. It included vacations and anything that I wanted to buy, just for myself. As time went on, that included things that I wanted to buy for my wife and for my kids, anything that wasn’t strictly necessary, but that I enjoyed doing regardless. The more money that I made, the more that I was able to spend, but the hobby stuff was always at the bottom end. If money was tight, I just didn’t buy anything for my hobbies. As life goes on, assuming you’ve made good life choices, you get more and more money, and not just more money, but “free” money, things that aren’t necessary to spend on other things. This is all about being an adult and living a fiscally responsible life.

Today, I can buy pretty much anything I want because I have plenty of money. How much? A lot. This came to light last weekend when we were down at my brother-in-law’s, celebrating his birthday. He’s a little older than I am and he’s been having back problems, stemming, somewhat, from a car accident that he had when he was younger. Therefore, he’s been having some pain and he’s been having trouble getting up from his chair. I told him that he ought to get one of those chairs with heat and massage that help you to stand up. They would do wonders for his back.

I was looking them up online and they run about $500, with all of the options that he wanted. He said he didn’t want to spend the money. My wife said “you’ve got more money than you could possibly spend in the rest of your life. Buy the damn chair!” So… he’s getting a delivery sometime at the beginning of September.

The problem with the young is that they seem to expect that they will be in the same position that I am, that their parents are in, when they are just starting out. They do not understand how reality works. They do not understand how work works. They think it all just shows up by magic without all of the years of hard work and sacrifice and that is not how any of this goes. They were never raised to understand the financial reality that they actually live in. They just got money whenever they wanted it. They apparently think it grows on trees. They never had to work for it and when you don’t have to work for things, you don’t understand that work is hard and that managing your finances matters.

No, they just came out of college with a piece of paper in their hands and a load of debt over their heads and no clue how the real world actually functions. This is something that parents are doing that harms their children. It’s why both of my kids are debt-free. One went to college on a full-ride scholarship, while working, and the other worked and paid her own way. Now, they’re both independent adults, or at least will be after October when my youngest moves out. They both have fat wallets and it wasn’t my doing, it was their own.

And they both have plenty of money to spend on their hobbies. Imagine that.