Electricity and car depreciation aren't fair calculations because people who do sell dogs do not just train and sell one dog, they have multiple dogs, so assuming that selling trained dogs is the ONLY source of income, one dog is not responsible for the entire cost of household electricity or value of a car, many people who are serious about making their living from this will have 10 dogs to sell at any one time, then you need to calculate how many dogs are sold per year vs. your living expenses. Then there's taking 2 or more dogs out to socialize at the same time, this is a more efficient use of time therefore everytime you double the efficiency of your time usage you're halving the amount one dog cost you.
For a hobbyist, cost per dog goes much higher than it does for someone who has 10 dogs at a time to sell and sells 30 dogs a year.
Realistically though, a dog dealer doesn't make much money on their dogs, maybe $1000 at most after the basic costs are considered, not including how much your time is worth per hour spent on the dog, but just food, vet bills, cost of purchasing the dog, cost of transport etc. So if you figure $1000 per dog selling 30 dogs a year that's $30,000/year (just by example, difficult to live in Orlando on $30k/year :lol
but my point is... all the OTHER expenses that you mentioned, electricity, vehicle depreciation, mortgage to pay for the house you can keep all these dogs at etc, this comes out of the earned $30,000, and is not figured into the cost of the dog, so essentially, figuring a mortgage at $15k a year assuming you got lucky, live in the boonies and bought before having acreage got expensive or whatever, that leaves $15k/year to pay for car payments, gas, utilities, human food etc etc etc.
At the end of the day, to make a living training and selling dogs, you need to sell alot of dogs or sell them for a higher price that people aren't willing to pay. The average police department pays $6000 for a dog (correct me if I'm wrong, but thats what local departments pay here).
If I were to sell Cujo after having raised him for 2 years and included all the costs pertaining directly to him plus what I charge people hourly for my time, excluding ulities and mortgage payments etc as I explained above that will come out of profits just like a "normal" person would have to do... he would be a $400,000 dog give or take. Have I spent $400k on him? HELL NO! But if I were to charge someone for the time I spent playing, raising, socializing and training him at the rate I charge people for doing other things, that's what it'd come out to. Maybe I should spend less time playing with dogs and more time working? :lol: Too bad it doesn't work that way.
Why doesn't he sell for $400k? Because nobody in their right mind will pay $400k for a dog just because that's how much time I spend with him and because my actual costs were far lower. He is not "worth" $400k from a "how much money do I have invested in him vs. How much profit do I turn when I sell him". If someone offered me $6000 for Cujo I'd rather keep the dog. I would make a bad dog dealer, because unless I sold alot of dogs and kept myself very detached from them, which is hard for me to do, I would have the "for $6000 I'd rather keep the damn dog" attitude, especially when at the end of the day that $6000 is only $1000 at best by the time I calculate actual direct expenses on that dog and that would be requiring me to feed much cheaper food, otherwise, raising a dog for 24 months and selling him, $6000 would barely cover the cost of food :lol:
