Ok, I have about 100 animals, and they're in the basement.
The reason we don't calculate rent into this is that unless you have dedicated the space to your business, you aren't allowed to write off the rent (as a percentage of your house) as a business expense. The government doesn't consider it to be a business expense if it is shared space, so why should you?

I'll go ahead and calculate that in anyhow. Let's say, $200 out of your rent/mortgage is devoted to your business space. Now electricity--that's fairly overblown, we probably spend less than $100 per month running the racks. The whole house would be heated regardless, so the animals don't take up extra gas heat, and the amount of water they take is also negligible, but I'll go ahead and add that in at $20.
Bedding costs just $80 per month for 100 animals, and there's no such thing as 'sundries' for a ball python collection.

I'll add in a few annual expenses to top it off, perhaps $100 in soap, bleach, sponges, provent-a-mite, whatever. Soap and bleach are cheap.

My snakes eat approximately $100 worth of food per week, so that's $400 per month.

I have around $6500 in equipment for heating, thermostats, incubators, racks, and tubs, water bowls, etc. While these are rough estimates rather than exact figures, they're fairly close.

That totals to $16,200
Estimated income for next year, 25,681.
Profit would be $9481.
Of course, that includes the cost of the equipment, which is rather silly, since that was paid off years ago.
So, remove that again.
Profit becomes $15,981.
Now, to put this into perspective, ONLY 18 females are actually breeding. The rest of the animals are males or holdbacks ranging from 2 year-olds to hatchlings! (I know people are twitchy about discussing numbers when it comes to their personal income or businesses, though I've honestly never fully understood why, which is why I'm willing to do so now).

With a collection of 100 animals, and only 18 females producing eggs, the PROFIT is over $15,000. And yes, I did factor in the holdbacks.
Now, imagine what it will be once the animals that are currently too young have reached maturity. Expenses will not increase significantly, and minimal equipment purchases will be needed (perhaps $2000 for hatchling racks, incubators, etc). Additionally, more high-valued animals will be produced than I have currently.
The profit goes up to $30,000, and then to $50,000, in just a couple of years, even factoring in depreciation.
Gold doesn't do that, sorry.
Gold is a good security, but it's not a great growth investment. Ball pythons, if you're willing to put in the work and you enjoy it, are an amazing investment. It's not low risk, but the potential is astounding, and that's why some of us are doing this.
Once you get up to 50K profit per year, if you continue the same plan, you can expect to increase profits by as much as 20K per year, because you will continue to have held back females coming into maturity. If you buy new high-end males when you can, it goes even faster.

Roughly, if you begin all of this with an investment of 20 ADULT females and some nice male morphs including a couple of double or triple gene males, then within 6 years, you can be making as much as 100K in profits. If you reinvest at least half of your profits, and do so wisely, it's virtually a certainty, provided you don't have anything disastrous happen to your collection (health issues, equipment failures, etc). If you've taken proper biosecurity precautions and have a fire system and security system, that shouldn't happen.

Can gold turn 20K into 100K in 6 years? Understand that once you reach that level, additional investments you make can be doubled in one year.

There are a lot of folks out there who lose their shirts trying to breed reptiles, but it's not because they're a bad investments. Most of the time, it's because they did it wrong. (Occasionally, disasters do happen, but they're rare).

Even if you have horrible luck, and only half your females breed, you still wind up making 100K in profit after 10 years. And it doesn't take nearly as long to get up to 500K as it took you to get to 100K. Yes, there are some breeders who are millionaires, they just don't talk about that. (Can you blame them?)
By the time you're ready to retire, you're going to be very comfortable.

Make no mistake about it, it's hard work, and you MUST have business management, marketing, and all sorts of other knowledge--it is a business. But it's a lot better than gold, if you do it right.