Lots of people have half finished crafts laying around that they mean to get to but never quite have the time or energy to focus on. Invite your friends over and out for a stitch and bitch- if it’s doing small repairs and mending on clothes, finishing a knitting project, tatting, or some other small thing it should be fairly transportable. Most cities and many large towns have established stitch and bitches, so if you want you might be able to find one and go to it, instead of pulling your friends over for one.

Many people working side by side and chatting while they work makes doing something that might otherwise be drudgery a lot of fun.

If your friends aren’t big on fiber arts, you can always find some other craft or repair to work on together- getting all the cars to do routine maintenance (an oil change party?), bringing the laptops together and working on photo editing or finishing your NANOWRIMO novels- anything. The real trick is to find something that’s repetitive and does not take your full attention, so that the social aspect of the situation can shine.

I keep mentioning that there are inexpensive ways to bring more genuine fun, joy, and pleasure into your life without having to spend a lot of money, and I was asked to put my money where my mouth was. How, exactly, DO you go about bringing more pleasure and warmth into your life while spending less, or no money? This month I’m going to highlight 31 things that I have either done, or should do, to have fun. Most of these involve getting together with friends. I’m going to try to keep these fairly general, and they are designed for a group of adults with perhaps one or two fairly mature 8+ year old kids involved, and the list does, admittedly, skew towards creative nerds, which comprises about 90% of my circle of friends. If you’ve got more kids, or your friends aren’t the creative or nerdy type, you might need to tweak some of these.

I challenge you to try at least one of these fun, cheap, community building events this month. I bet you’ll discover that you see more of your friends and people you love, you laugh a lot, and you have a great time. You’ll be so busy spending quality time with the amazing people in your life and having fun you won’t have the spare time to spend money!

Let me know which one you try and how it works out!

I’d like to say a positive word here about cheap hobbies, and hobbies that make you money. I think they’re the best way to spend your time. There is a lot of joy in this world out for the taking, and most of it costs little to no money.

When I say hobbies that make you money, I mean things like knitting or crafting- but only if you use the item and make it for less than it costs to buy (in which case you’re saving money), or if you sell your completed crafts on web sites like Etsy. I paint and knit and am probably going to start making silk scarves and shawls to sell, so that my hobby that makes money. If you loved tinkering on cars, you could probably do well taking a class at a local community college or getting ASE certified in your spare time. A friend of mine went from being the most miserable person I knew to one of the happier by simply following his childhood dream and becoming a paramedic. He now volunteers on the weekends doing what he loves while keeping his day job, but he’s gotten several job offers from it and could easily make his paramedic work a second job.

One of my hobbies is my hair, and as far as hobbies go, it’s very cheap. When I am spending extravagantly on my hair, I might spent $20.00 a month. I think my top spending for my hair since I started growing it long was still less than $50.00, and that was the month I got all my flexi-8’s, which will probably last my natural life as I haven’t lost any yet, and they’re sturdy enough that when I got my happy concussion in the car accident by slamming my head with flexi-8, it didn’t suffer at all.

Joy is very important, and having fun is important too. If you’re just frugal and you have no fun, you’re probably going to try to go for the short-term entertainment. Short term amusement does little to bring a deeper sense of fulfillment or joy into your life, however. Getting your finances in order, while important, is a means to an end. If you mistake it for an end, when you get there you might feel like all your hard work and effort was for nothing. You might feel like you SHOULD be happy, but you just feel… hollow. Don’t neglect yourself to reach financial freedom. You can still increase the amount of genuine pleasure and joy in your life, by reducing the amount of time, money and effort you spend on things that don’t actually make you happy.

Here is a short and incomplete list of some cheap hobbies that might bring you a lot of satisfaction.

1. Hiking on local trails. Google will show you what’s available. Spending the weekend camping in the woods, or even taking a day hike and picnicking can be inexpensive and really fun.
2. Building something that’s just slightly outside your current range of skill. If you want to combine this with helping others, you can join habitat for humanity and work on houses.
3. Learning to do something you didn’t think you could do.
4. Repairing or fixing something that someone else had gotten rid of
5. Going somewhere and drawing pictures of people in a sketchbook. By the way, for you single folks, this is a great way to get a date.
6. Training for a sporting event like a local run, triathlon, or something that floats your boat.
7. Babysitting a friends kids, or doing something fun and unexpected with yours. Kids are hilarious.
8. Learn something that you can apply in your life.
9. Watching a course on iTunes U
10. Build a blimp, robot, or rocket in your back yard with instructions you found on Instructabless.
11. Watch the movies you always meant to get around to, or the books you always meant to read.
12. Learn to cook something you can’t currently cook.
13. Make a picture based treasure hunt, get your friends together, and send everyone off with a digital camera.
14. Host a potluck with friends you wish you saw more often.
15. Write handwritten letters to people you love that live far away.

Learning things, doing things, and going out in nature are all cheap, can be done with a friend, and can be deeply fulfilling. Connecting with people is way more fun than collecting things. Just remember that there is a multi billion dollar campaign out there that is trying to convince you that you need to spend money to be happy. That’s a lie- figure out what fills you up! For me, I’ve found a lot of unexpected pleasure in learning to keep my house nicely and clean (let’s just say that finding out I liked to clean more than I liked going to movies or spending money was a shock), and learning to bake. I love learning new things, and there really is a lot of fun in deciding to make a special meal, going grocery shopping for fresh ingredients, and cooking it for someone you care about. Throw in a couple of taper candles and a CD of snazzy music and you’ve got a date night. Throw in a cake and you’ve got a birthday party or a celebration. If cooking isn’t your thing, find another skill you can learn and go out and do it.

Saving money is good, getting out of debt is crucial, but never forget that it’s a means to an end. If you are making yourself miserable with your sacrifices, find something that won’t detract from your goals that makes you happy and do it. Life is too short, too beautiful, and too interesting to spend time bored

For some people, gardening costs them a lot of money. Every year they go to the garden center, buy lots of beautiful flowering annuals, put them in, and follow with all kinds of expensive, exotic plants. Then they get bored and half way through the season rip out all the expensive flowers and move things around in their garden. The part of the garden that is not covered in impulse plant purchases is grass that’s either half dead with thirst, or been shocked with so many chemicals the air smells faintly of weed killer. There are no butterflies in this kind of garden, because while the insecticides kill the aphids, they also drive away the dragonflies and the ladybugs.

Personally, I think these people are insane. They spend so much time and energy controlling their yards and what do they get out of it? Something to look out of their windows at, perhaps?

I love food gardens. Give me a lawn that’s been torn up for a WWII style Victory Garden, or possibly a gently sweeping wildflower medow, over grass any day. If you need a lawn, give me a lawn that’s been planted with clover and creeping thyme over grass any day (especially in the Western states- we don’t have enough water to keep grass happy, yet clover stays green and lovely year round) and keep the grasses to the soft, decorative accents.

If I am going to spend the amount of money it takes to get a garden started, I am not likely to buy flats of annuals. I want a return on my money.

A top-quality fruit tree from David Wilson Nursery (who have fantastic info on starting a home orchard)  will run a little under $30 if you can get it locally. If you plant it well, you will be able to get top quality, organic fruit for less effort than it takes to drive to the grocery store and put up with the lines. If you don’t have the room for a backyard orchard (you would be surprised at how little room it takes) there’s always the beautiful plants from Edible Landscaping. I have wild plans for when I have achieved my goal of My Own Damn House ™ and they involve

1. Planting a blackberry/raspberry/other berries hedge along the sides of the property to give me a nice, tall fence against my neighbors, and to provide me the frozen berries for smoothies for the year. I had a peeping tom neighbor once, and while the elderly Widow McGuillicutty might be sweet as pie, if she sells her house to Pervy McTentypants, I want an 8 foot wall of foliage there BEFORE I dread going into my backyard.

2. Against the back fence of the property, plant myself a lovely little mini orchard. Backyard orchards need maintenence twice a year-trimming to keep them easy to harvest from, and thinning the fruit. If you have apricot trees you might need to prune twice a year. After that you can ignore your trees until harvest time. The flowers and scents are amazing, and once they are established you don’t need to do much for them. Most home fruit trees are killed by over watering- after the first year you literally just let them do their thing, and water if you see the word “Drought” in the newspapers.

3. Put in a 6 foot tall fence, and behind it put bees. Bees fly in a strait line, so if you have a high fence they’ll go over it and are much less likely to bother the neighbors, or my husband who is deathly allergic to bees.

All of these projects are less that most of the silly full sized palm trees I see at garden centers, and I’ll get honey, fresh fruit, and berries from them for less in-the-yard work than a lawn takes.

I don’t see how anyone would WANT a traditional lawn when the alternatives are less expensive in the long run, and have so many other benefits!