Finding your next retirement hobby

Transcript

So we've been working through our series on finding new hobbies if you've recently retired or if you're retired and you haven't found hobbies yet. And we've been using the exercise called the flower exercise from the book, What Color Is Your Parachute? We just sort of adapted it a little bit for hobbies, but the exercise was originally created for people in the workforce to find that next ideal career. And I just noticed that so many of the exercises tied directly over to hobbies. And the value to me was that it allowed me to sort of parameterize certain characteristics around my own psychology to use my personality, the things that engage me, etc. as ingredients and create a hobby recipe where I can custom build a hobby. That really works. For me, instead of just pulling something off the rack, that may not be a good fit for me. So today we're on pedal six, which is geography. And in pedal two, we talked about environment. So environment is like, are you inside? Are you in a dimly lit area? Are you in a brightly lit area? Are you in a big open area? Are you in a little office or cubicle? That's environment. Geography is like what part of the world? And one of the reasons. Geography plays such an important role in hobbies is and this is going to be a little bit of a fancy example. I don't kite surf, but I'm just using it as an example. If you kite surf like South Africa is apparently an extremely inexpensive place to kite surf. So if you were to say, OK, so for my kite surfing hobby, the geography is going to be South Africa and maybe these two other geographies where the difference in price actually pays. So if you were to say, OK, so for my kite surfing hobby, the geography is going to be South Africa and maybe these two other geographies where the difference in price actually pays. For my travel and accommodations. And so geography can have a big impact on the cost of your hobby. It can increase your hobby cost or it could reduce your hobby cost. And I think if we're being honest with ourselves, there is no reducing your hobby cost. I mean, hobbies just cost money. There's no there's no plus side other than the psychological benefits. But if we can spend less than that's a good thing. So the second thing about geography is obviously weather. If you're big into skiing, you know, you're going to be looking for higher altitudes, colder climates, et cetera. If you're into boating or swimming or fishing, you're going to be looking for warmer climates. But I just want to circle back on the cost factor one more time, because again, like I'm I'm still pretty interested in fishing. I don't do it as much as I did when I was younger. But there are massive swings in like China. And I think that's a good thing. And like charter costs, depending on where you go geographically. So I would start on the geography question from is my hobby more or less expensive, depending on the geography? And does the difference in price based on geography offset the cost of travel there? So if you save five hundred dollars to kite surf in South Africa over Florida and you live in Alabama, obviously you're not going to save enough to. offset the cost of travel and accommodation. So, um, just be thinking about the geography, you know, the weather, the altitude and how it might impact the cost of your hobby.