considering starting breeding.. need help

[boyer.michael.s]

I am going to explain to you how I feel you should go about your choice of starting to breed your Ball Pythons (this is going based off the assumption that you are trying to either break even or simply have a self-sustaining hobby).

In my opinion, if you want to be successful with breeding you need to look at things a certain way. The first thing you should do is determine how much money you are willing to spend on startup costs. Although it is possible to make this startup money back, you should look at this initial investment as a sunk cost that you might not ever get back and you should be fine with never seeing that money again (after all, if this is a hobby of yours that you love, you shouldn’t be bothered by investing money that you may never see again anyway). By doing this you won’t put yourself in a situation where you may start to struggle financially if you don’t seeing a return of this money as soon as you would like. These startup costs should include all your enclosures (rack system), your initial snake investments (your first project), your incubation method, and other various essential supplies you will need at the start your breeding adventure.

After you have figured your initial investment out you will then want to break down your monthly fees such as feeding and bedding. Once you have estimated what you may need to spend monthly you should then start tracking your profit margins. I will explain what I mean below based solely on one twelve month period to make things simple.

Let’s say your initial investment is $5,000. To keep things simple let’s only calculate for food and bedding as your additional costs for the twelve month period. Say you spend $100 a month on food and $100 a month of bedding supplies. For the twelve month period you will now have invested another $2,400 on top of the $5,000 initial investment. This means your total investment that you will be trying to gain back just to break even is now $7,400. Now let’s say all of your snakes are ready to breed there first year so that you can get a return on investment your first year. With that said, say you end up with a total of two clutches your first year with five good eggs in each clutch giving you a total of ten new snakes when they are all born for you to sell. If these ten snakes each sold for $300 that would mean you would receive $3,000 dollars back in your first year making your total loss for your first year only $4,400 (this is if you decide to include your initial investment in your calculations).

Now take that same situation I just explained above and eliminate the initial investment from your profit margin. If that is done, you would only be $2,400 in the hole for your first year. That means that once you hatch your ten snakes and sell them at $300 each, you will again receive $3,000 which will now put you at a profit of $600 (this is if you do not include your initial investment in your calculations).

With those calculations you now have a self-sustaining hobby that even made you profit for the year. This profit could be used to fund part of your food and bedding costs for your next year, it could be used to help fund a new project, or it could simply go back in your pocket.

With those calculations you now have a self-sustaining hobby that even made you profit for the year. This profit could be used to fund part of your food and bedding costs for your next year, it could be used to help fund a new project, or it could simply go back in your pocket.

Now obviously these numbers I used are just filler numbers and are not actual calculations but if you track your costs in this fashion without getting tied up in worrying about your initial investment to get your hobby started, I think you will see a better result in the end. I hope everything I said makes sense and is useful for you in your future plans regardless of how you go about your plans. Also if I did seem to make any errors in this post or something I said wasn’t clear enough to understand, please let me know and I will explain it more clearly. Good Luck.