I know that in my case back when I was old enough to buy licenses that it was all on me. If I couldn't save enough money throughout the year to buy my fishing and hunting licenses then I didn't go fishing or hunting. But that didn't stop me, I always put away the license money as fast as I could, then came ammo money. There were a couple of years that I was collecting pop bottles to take into the store for the refunds.
My dads job prevented him from doing any hunting, he never knew where he was going to be at when the season came around and most of the time he was working in a different state and didn't have any time off to figure out where he could hunt in that state, not to even think of our home state. But the hunting bug bit me hard the few times when I was very young so I had incentive to get that tag money put away before I thought about anything else.