Relocation and stop the practice

[mike71]

Hi. My story short: I've stopped taking lessons on piano and practice last june. Stopping the lessons was because the yearly summer pause, but I didn't restart this October.
I've also stopped practicing because I've relocated and I had a lot of thing to do, and a series of "surprises", so my digital piano was packed in a box.
I've decided to unpack it and now is in the dining room in the new flat. So far so good.

Now the problems. One is that due to the aforementioned "surprises" I've run out of budget hard, so I had to cut expenses for some months. The other is that the old piano school and the old teacher that were a 10 minute walk from home, now are a 45 minutes car trip.

Now I feel difficult to restart. I don't know if restarting self studying is useful or is better to for instance to study music theory for using some program for improving the ear training, and wait for better times to go to music lessons.
I could also sometimes kindly ask a friend some help, but of course I can't abuse their time.

At the end the question is: it's really so harmful to study piano alone, giving the alternative it's to stopping at all?
 

[chopinlover01]

Better to study alone than not at all, but try and find a pianist to be able to ask questions and stuff. I'll happily self promote
You can PM me any time and I'll answer questions to the best of my ability; that said I'm not the greatest musician on here by a long shot, so try and get some answers from other people on here.
Cheers!

[pianocat3]

I gave up lessons as an intermediate student (I took some lessons as a kid, and some as an adult) for about 15 years and just played for fun sometimes, and for a few years, I gave it up altogether. It took a couple months to get my skills back, but they did come back fine, although I did develop a bad habit of looking at my hands too much when playing in those intervening years. Now that I'm taking lessons again, I am much more advanced than I was before.  So imo, if you are like me (are you? I have no idea how universal my experience is) if you just play for fun, you won't lose too much. It doesn't seem that I lost any of my ability to read music and I still had the hand coordination and knew how to pedal etc - none of that seemed to get lost. I was just rusty. maybe the more advanced someone is, the more they lose. I was at a level that would be most of the way thru most method books, I'd guess. So I think you will be fine on your own for awhile and hopefully you are more disciplined than me and not develop too many bad habits. If you get feedback once in awhile from a musician friend, probably you won't.