Noahthai Hem figures his Pokémon card collection will help fund his wedding some day. The 26-year-old Toronto-based bartender began collecting the cards as a hobby in his late teens out of love for Pokémon. Since then, he’s purchased cards for as much as $2,000. “I never would have done that if I didn’t think it would appreciate in value,” he says. His collection is currently worth around $30,000; he thinks it could be worth $40,000 in a couple of years.
For hobbyists like Hem, the jump from fun hobby to side hustle begins with a simple realization: I’m already doing this in my spare time, so why not make money from it? In the hustle economy, leisure's been reevaluated through the lens of productivity and asset appreciation. Sneakers and luxury watches are viewed as alternative asset classes, home bakers launch Instagram storefronts, and collectors track card values like day traders.
Instead of pursuing a hobby for the love of it, we’ve normalized the idea that passion projects should pay for themselves – or better yet, turn a profit. A normalized idea, however, isn’t always a good one. In some cases, it may defeat the whole point of a hobby in the first place.
Driven by high living costs, social media, and cultural shifts, hobbyists across income brackets are turning their leisure activities into side hustles or investments. For lower- and middle-income earners facing high living costs, monetizing a hobby like baking offers a flexible way to cover basic bills during free evening hours; some may even dream of it becoming a full-time career. For those with more disposable income, framing expensive passions – like collecting luxury watches, vintage guitars, or fine wine – as alternative investments rebrands discretionary spending (like that rare Rolex watch) as savvy wealth management. In both cases, passion and play can get replaced by financial expectations.
Hem's stock portfolio is currently outperforming the growth of his Pokémon collection.
While some enthusiasts treat physical collections like alternative portfolios, academic research has shown that their financial performance rarely holds up against standard market benchmarks like the S&P500. In a 2014 study financial expert Elroy Dimson and Christophe Spaenjers analyzed long-run returns across collectibles like stamps and art, which they call ‘emotional assets.’ Their findings – and research published by the CFA Institute – reveal that, while collectibles can generate real positive returns, they also carry higher volatility, transaction costs, and other risks than conventional financial assets.
These days, Hem is in a holding pattern with his portfolio of cards. “I had to take a break from buying Pokémon because I wasn’t budgeting properly, and decided it was more important to invest in stocks,” he says. His stock portfolio – which he started about a year ago – is currently outperforming the growth of his Pokémon collection, having seen 300% growth in one year. Meanwhile, his cards have flatlined, and recently declined 2.4% over 90 days. “Everyone is saying Pokémon is so expensive right now, so a lot of the prices are dropping,” he says.
Market forces are no fun
When hobbyists attempt to realize paper gains by trading their objects of fancy, market friction can quickly erode their nominal profits. Secondary marketplaces like eBay, StockX, and TCGPlayer take about 10% to 15% in fees on gross sales. Maintenance costs – like storage, insurance, climate control, authentication, and grading – further erode collectors’ margins.
In the world of collecting, market forces often work against small-scale hobbyists looking to make a buck. Cameron Hart is the manager of Toronto’s Face to Face Games, a brick and mortar retailer of collectible cards. While his operation is a fully-fledged business, he faces similar constraints as the folks working from home.
Hart says capital-rich buyers often game the market by sweeping up inventory online. "Targeted buyouts introduce artificial scarcity, but the price swings are very real,” he says. “People checking devices at home think there’s real movement, when it’s just the work of a few individuals."
After a pandemic-era surge, the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index fell two years in a row before stabilizing in 2025.
Lately, the broader luxury collectible market has cooled down and become more selective. After the pandemic-era surge unwound, the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index – which tracks the performance of luxury collectibles as investments – fell two years in a row before stabilizing in 2025. Although 10-year returns remain strong (up 38.6%), buyers have become more disciplined, favouring rarity and value.
Even in a collectible market with impressive long-term returns, making money requires patience, knowledge, and the ability to pick the right assets – a far cry from a quick and easy side hustle.
The psychology of monetization
Monetizing a hobby also changes the way people experience it. Psychologists have studied the overjustification effect, where getting paid for something you enjoy can make the activity feel like work and take all the fun out of it.
For hobbyists, the implication is straightforward: Once a collector tracks every card as an investment, or a baker calculates the value of every evening in the kitchen, they're just running a very small, very unprofitable business. It’s no longer necessarily about enjoyment, but whether it was worth the time.
"The biggest misconception is expecting lightning to strike twice," says Hart. In the card-collecting world, that means finding gold in the attic, or standard packs turning into jackpots. His own store made headlines in 2023 when a customer discovered a one-of-a-kind The One Ring Magic Card in a joint Magic: The Gathering and Lord of the Rings collectors box. The customer, Brook Trafton, ended up selling the card to superstar Post Malone for a cool US$2 million.
These success stories make generating money from a hobby seem easier than it actually is. Realistically, many hobbyists never recoup their outlay, but they still risk losing the personal enjoyment that drew them to the activity in the first place. "Everyone is aware of the value of collectibles these days, and the cost of entry is higher than ever. Even if you access rare items, your big payday may still be months or years away,” says Hart. And that assumes it comes at all.
The microeconomics of side hustle labour
As far as hobbies go, collecting isn’t particularly labour intensive. But many others are, and that can't be discounted. Homemade goods or artisanal baking can’t be trivially automated – every additional unit produced demands more hours of labour in return. Making money from social media may take countless hours spent on content production before any money is made. Monetizing these hobbies can come with costs measured in hours of your life.
Jessica Papp, a self-taught maker who founded handknit label Hotpot Variety in 2020, originally picked up crochet as a creative outlet during the pandemic, experimenting with textiles and hand-crafting unique pieces inspired by her Vietnamese heritage. After positive feedback on an early collection of bucket hats, Papp launched her brand in October 2020.
The jump from hobbyist to business owner came with several unpleasant surprises. Papp says that absorbing 100% of self-employment taxes, overhead, and insurance was a shock to the system. Overhead included packaging, labels, getting sizing charts made, software and programs for work, supplies, tools, and then eventually a studio space when the business grew and she needed storage space for inventory and supplies.
The pressure of production, sourcing materials, maintaining quality, and keeping up with new collections ultimately led Papp to burnout.
"Because crochet can't be done by machines, each piece takes hours of manual work," says Papp. "For pieces that take up to 30 to 40 hours of work, I’d normally need to cut my typical target hourly wage by 30% so that it’s still affordable." Wholesale distribution further compressed her profits. “Costing out margins was a huge learning curve,” Papp says. Early on, she scaled up to major retailers like Holt Renfrew, which typically demand a 50% cut of a product’s retail price. “I barely broke even on my first collection after accounting for proper tags, materials, and manual labour,” she says.
Papp became overwhelmed balancing her nine-to-five job with fulfilling Holt Renfrew’s wholesale orders; to keep up, she found herself hand-making two to three hats per day, all while learning to run every other aspect of her new business. The pressure of production, sourcing materials, maintaining quality, and keeping up with new collections ultimately led her to burnout.
"The stock market isn't as volatile as Pokémon."
After taking a break to recharge and recalibrate her strategy, Papp says her profit margins have become much stronger. She only takes on projects and partnerships that meet her margin targets, which tends to mean commissioned works for stylists and certain clients. She’s also working towards launching knitting and crochet patterns. “Since crochet and knitwear is so specific, I am still looking for local suppliers and manufacturers that can help me scale,” she says. Papp says Hotpot Variety has become her hobby again – at least, for the meantime. “When it turned into a full-time job, it became too overwhelming,” she says. “For now, the pace feels healthy for me.”
As Papp’s experiences show, revenue alone is a poor measure of whether a monetized hobby is actually paying off. Once platform fees, overhead, taxes, and all that unpaid administrative work are accounted for, the effective return on the owner’s time can be a lot smaller than expected.
Hem, the Pokémon collector, still loves “ripping packs and getting a good card.” But it’s no longer about the money: these days, he spends much more time managing his stock portfolio than he does scouring Toronto’s card shows. “The stock market isn’t as volatile as Pokémon,” he says. With his money in the real market, he’s become more free to actually enjoy his passion. He calls it a fun hobby – exactly what it’s supposed to be.
