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Ever get a queasy feeling in your stomach when your kids or spouse tell you that they're about to start pursuing a new hobby? And don't you get an instant sense of relief when they tell you that the new hobby is raising pigmy chickens or growing organic tomatoes or collecting garden variety insects from your back yard. What a joy it is to watch them chase the little critters instead of being couch potatoes. These are the type of activities that help round out their lives and build useful life skills.
But what if the kids decide to pursue hobbies outside the confines of your back yard. What if the little darlings have a passionate interest in the kind of hobbies that can lead you to the poorhouse. If the kids develop an interest in any of the following five hobbies, I suggest you do yourself a favor and put them up for adoption before the entire family is forced to seek shelter in a trailer park.
5. Recreational Flying:
Forget the fears of an accident while flying. If your kid convinces you to let him fly a plane for fun, the only thing that is likely to crash and burn is your savings account. Start with the cost of a decent starter plane like the Cessna Skyhawk. It will run you about $112,000. You can snag a 20 year old Cessna for about half that price, but be prepared to spend a pretty penny on maintenance. Then of course, there are the operating costs. It costs about 60 cents a mile to fuel these energy hogs. Another way to calculate it is the cost per minute of flying time - well north of a dollar. And when you're not flying the budget buster, you have to pay to park it. Then of course there are the airport fees. Add on to that all the training and flying can easily run your family $15,000 or more each year after putting up that chunk of change to buy the plane. You can always rent, but get ready to pay up to $150 an hour plus gas. So, for a hundred hours of flying, expect to dish out $20,000 a year. For that kind of money, you can adopt and raise fifty kids from Guatemala. So, do the compassionate thing. Trade in your darling wannabe Red Barron for twenty kids from Guatemala for a saving of 60%.
4. Model Train Collecting:
That cute train that you bought Johnny for the holidays when he was seven will come back to bite you. Train collecting can be an enormously expensive hobby. If nothing else, this hobby requires a 'private space' for the kid - so get prepared to build a 500 square foot addition to accomodate the expanding rail lines. Forget about the kids for a second - if it's your husband taking up this hobby, he'll find out very quickly how to purchase $100 plus locomotives on Ebay. And if he's anything like the man of the house in the Adams Family, he'll be blowing up a few dozen of them every weekend. A final word of caution, expect to spend your vacations at train conventions in exotic destinations like Petticot Junction so he can bid on antique train locomotives and such. To avoid these type of expensive hobbies, log onto Amtrak's website, buy a lifetime pass and spend the rest of your life riding the rails. Estimated savings - 73.33%. You can save more if you buy a sack of dorritos and avoid the dining car.
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