You are not that old either, right Joe?
Most young people in the bonsai hobby I know of do have worth a lot of money of trees. I only know a couple of dudes about my age, but they have a collection worth a few bucks as well. I know mine is.
Maybe because young people are rare in weird hobbies like bonsai and that young people in general have holes in their hands and pockets so we have the reputation of being poor, we get a lot of stuff cheaper than old people (yup, that's you
) as a stimulator or something so to say. Thanks!!!!!
We (most of us) don't have a mortgage/college bills (they come when the education is finished) and stuff either yet. Add still living with parents aka no rent to that and your spendable income is (almost) as much as the whole of your income.
If you have a (saturday) job and no kids that is a bonus too.
I have a car together with my little brother that costs a lot of money, but that deducted my spendable income still is about 200 euros a month because I have a saturday job and tiny handholes.
I'm about three years into bonsai now = 36*200 = 7200 euro that could've been spent on bonsai.
Which isn't, but still.
I've dug a couple of trees from hedges and gardens and stuff which all would be around 100 euro a piece if I'd sell them coming fall. That's a boxwood, three yews, a firethorn, two squamata junipers and a hornbeam, on the top of my head. That's almost a grand of trees, while they have cost me about 10 litres of diesel (3 gallons or so). I can't be the only one who digs up stuff, so building a multiple thousand dollar collection that way shouldn't be very difficult. We have no mountains or whatever close to home in the river delta, so no 'real' yamadori over here, but gardens and hedges can be and are a huge resource
And although pots are expensive, they are not so if you buy them in bigger amounts. Sometimes I buy collections of pots for about one or two euros a piece. If a couple of those are handmade or at least have some chop or look good the value of those few mostly exceeds the price I paid. Not that I'm selling those pots, but those that I don't want do go in the selling box.
Last summer I bought 105 or so pots for about 150 euro. At least 20 of those were proper quality = 7.5€ a pot. You simply don't pay that little if bought one by one.
If you can get larger amounts of decent pots, do it, if the budget permits. It pays off. Seriously.
I may be talking a lot, saying not so much but the point is that with not too much money (relatively of course, but 'not too much' for me is about 500/600 € a year) and a fair bit of luck one can come quite far in building cool collection in a short time.
High spendable income + low costs of living + free/cheap stuff = cool bonsai collection pretty quickly
Sorry about the long offtopic story, but I wanted to make clear youths these days in general don't have lives that tough. And many thanks to everyone who is enabling that!
Edit: I forgot about tools and wire and such. That shit is not cheap either. Those are the things that really take a chunk out of your wallet. Even old secondhand tool collections cost a lot of money (cheap yes, but still). But if you got pots and garden 'yamadori' anyway; trade! Trading stuff for stuff has it perks. Most of the time for both traders!
