Luckily my wife has never cared what I spend on hunting gear, components, shooting etc. For those of you that do get a hard time I though you might find this useful
When I lived in Calgary I shot a lot of gophers. Easily 20,000 rounds a year. About half of that was centerfire 17 or 22 caliber so for that reason I kept a very large supply of 17 and 22 caliber projectiles and loaded bulk with a Dillon 550. The last really big order was made in 2011 and in 2013 we moved to Edmonton.
Well being in Edmonton I don't go through anywhere near as much ammo shooting gophers as I did in Calgary. I decided to sell off the 40,000 projectiles and new bags of brass that seemed surplus to my current shooting volumes. Original cost on the projectiles alone was about $6,400. Even selling them at a discount to current store prices, realized sales amount to a little over $11,000 or a 72% gain in 8 years. The bags of new brass more than doubled on resale.
The extra guns I had around to handle the high volume of shooting, I always figured that most of the time it was cheaper as well as far faster to buy another gun than to have one re-barreled, sold for almost double what I had bought them for used in 2007-2010. These were guns that had not been put into service yet so they were still very low round count rifles.
Now how many other hobbies or sports can you say that about. Of course we won't mention what the costs would have been to use up that inventory of projectiles, brass and rifles had I stayed living in Calgary. All in though, it provides a great rational for asking what her ten year old shoes are worth on resale.