If the hobbies are important to you, keep them. Cut the stuff that isn't.
The wife and I plan to travel full time in FIRE, and will have a budget of between 40 and 60k. It's worth it to us to work a few extra years to have a stache to support that, rather than what we could spend if we were staying put (25kish).
It's all tradeoffs and what your time is worth to you. If it's worth selling more of your time to fund those hobbies, great. As long as you're aware of what it's costing you.
Wow! This thread suddenly got a lot of activity & I didn't even notice. Here are my thoughts:
I've started getting into travel hacking & have managed to cut the vacation budget down to pretty much nothing. This was super easy; I opened 3 credit cards & got "free" flights/hotel stays. Awesome! Hopefully I can start working a little bit of overtime to cover the rest of our costs, like activities & incidentals while we're there.
Success has not been so forthcoming with flying expenses. Husband has his ATP & his CFI, so he occasionally gets extra cash from working with a student. He's also been doing some freelance work related to his 9-to-5 job skills, but nothing that's very steady. I'm trying to encourage him to get more contacts so he can become self-sufficient, but he doesn't seem super motivated. I'll let him know about some of the other options people on here have listed. He has a little two-seater, so flying other people around isn't in the cards, but that would be an AMAZING thing to do.
So, besides the fact that he's not covering the costs of his hobby, I'm also kind of bitter about it because it's not worth the money to me. We both benefit from traveling because we both enjoy it, but I would happily give up his airplane if it meant retiring earlier. I'm a great wife, aren't I? Part of what really drives me crazy is that it comes with other added expenses; we need to keep a car so he can get to his airplane, he needs his iPhone because he uses it for flying, etc. I'm cutting the rest of our budget down to the bone (cooking a ton, stopped the gym, thrift shopping, renting out our spare room, homemade gifts) but I still can't get us to my desired level of spending! I don't want to turn into a bitter harpy about this, but I fear that's the way I'm heading.