What is your biggest expense?

What is your biggest expense when breeding ball pythons? For me it would be rat block to feed breeder rodents and substrate.

Rat block is whatever. It's what, 50$ every two to three months?

The biggest killer is my time, effort, and mental drain. You have to put a value on YOUR time, and honestly at an hour a day at 10 bucks an hour, that's 300$ worth of effort every month. Even if you're only spending an hour a week, it's still 40$ a month. That beats out rat food by double.

Rat$$, rat$$ rat$$ are the number one expense.

The time I take cleaning and such is my relaxation time. I hold conversations with the animals at the same time and they seem to always agree (LOL). When this part of it starts to feel like work to me it will be time to downsize.

Normally it's feeders, but for the past year it's been vet bills.

To be fair that's because I've taken on some rescues, and because I opted for surgery on a retic where the alternative was to put her down.

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Originally Posted by Oxylepy

Rat block is whatever. It's what, 50$ every two to three months?

The biggest killer is my time, effort, and mental drain. You have to put a value on YOUR time, and honestly at an hour a day at 10 bucks an hour, that's 300$ worth of effort every month. Even if you're only spending an hour a week, it's still 40$ a month. That beats out rat food by double.

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Honestly if you are thinking about it like that, then you should probably get out of breeding. A lot of people do it because they enjoy snakes and the excitement of 'Christmas Day' when you get to see the babies and what patterns/colors you got. The selling end of it just covers the cost of the enjoyment and excitement. I mean sure, some people make a living on it but I imagine for most, it is what I already stated. At least it would be like that for me if I bred boas.

And I don't breed but I will say the single biggest expense even for not breeding is feeders. My snakes are garbage cans especially my retic who is just bottomless. I have no idea where he hides so much food in such a skinny little snake lol.

I never said it wasn't enjoyable, but time is by a wide margin the biggest expense for me. I don't even sell snakes, I give them away. But it does take time, time to care for breeder rats, time to care for snakes, a lot of time. Far and away that time is the biggest expense. It doesn't mean I mind spending the time, it just means I look at time as a realistic expense.

Setting things up for snakes is a lot of expense as a single time one. Dealing with difficult feeders and the depression of failure to thrive is a drain. Just in general there is a lot of time that goes into the snakes, a lot of effort. Sure it's enjoyable, but time is an expense that must be paid

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Originally Posted by Oxylepy

I never said it wasn't enjoyable, but time is by a wide margin the biggest expense for me. I don't even sell snakes, I give them away. But it does take time, time to care for breeder rats, time to care for snakes, a lot of time. Far and away that time is the biggest expense. It doesn't mean I mind spending the time, it just means I look at time as a realistic expense.

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LOL. I get it. I am just preventing myself from doing the calculation of much it really costs me. If I attempt to factor in a couple more hours of real work time a day money wise there is no way I could justify snake time.

My time if I was to count my hours but since I love what I do it really does not matter to me.

Feeders well it's the cost of breeding snakes I have my feeder cost down to $0.50 per snake, however I also make some money on feeders since I sell mice too.

Electricity, water is a drop in the bucket (I run my snake room for free most of the year using ambient temp only)

Snake bedding is not so bad depending on the bedding and how often it last without needing a full change.

Either way 5 to 10 animals sold on average and my expenses are covered so I can't complain.



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Electricity. Heat for all the reptiles and A/C for the rats.

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Originally Posted by PitOnTheProwl

Electricity. Heat for all the reptiles and A/C for the rats.

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How cool do you keep your rats?