[g939763]

I breed, train and sell horses. So I do construction, which started as a need to build structures for horses, and then turned into side gigs. It's easy as an engineer with a maxint salary and -tism to enter the construction field, because you have the discipline and the skill to read and retain manufacturer's manuals and code. I mean I have one of those autistic recalls for multimillion line codebases, I can probably remember what pitch requires ice and water shield, or nailing patterns, and such. A lot of respectable construction outfits don't, don't bother, or rely on your ignorance to do a shoddy job. Because of -tism, my work started baseline good and only improved with time, like that scene from game of thrones "many maesters whose chains are heavy with healing links have attempted it and failed, yet you succeeded. how?" "I read the books and followed the instructions". the maxint part means that you can easily outfit yourself as a pro from the very beginning. I bought a coil nailer before I even laid my first shingle, I bought a bunch of scrap material to shingle a sheet of sheathing as if it was an entire roof in my workshop, I then did it over and over and over again until I was satisfied with the result. by the time I started on the run-in which was my first roofing project I burned $$$, but got an excellent result. by the time I was doing it for other people I had a solid understanding of the failure state space, so I could make strong claims about results. this is not an approach that most apprentice builders can afford to take.

[bilsbie]

Is the horse side not profitable enough on its own?

[g939763]

I've literally written a dozen of answers, that I then removed, because that question that you asked goes in the direction of life planning and life goals, it turned into a kind of personal exploration, but also I can talk horse for hours. because this place is trolled by ais and dimwitted copy cats, whenever I hit some deep truth in the many answers that I've written, I'm reluctant to just post them to public like that, so I'll be brief and somewhat superficial: horse business is very volatile, as is it can provide me with a modest living, as I get better I get better control of volatility, but then I encounter some global effects, that I didn't think about. For example horse business was booming during covid for obvious reasons, but then we had an economic downturn, and last year on top of that we had drought, so everyone I know is hurting. but a lot of volatility is inherent: you can buy someone's field puppy at discount, who is otherwise papered, well broke and sound, put him through few months of tuning, and then hit jackpot because two people got into a bidding war, going way above the value. on the other hand there's all kinds of events that can eat away at horse's value, vet visits, freak accidents, and the longer you hold him the higher the probability. in the most catastrophic cases the value goes to zero. getting good margins takes a lot of experience. there comes I believe a point of certainty, where you've been doing it long enough, you've settled in your niche, you have a global view of risk profile, you have mitigations in place, you're no longer faking inner stability in front your heard, you are living it, when things just work, I'm not quite there yet, but I'm sure I will be.

[bilsbie]

Thanks for the details!

What would the economics look like for selling unpapered horses just randomly bred? Is that even possible?

Also what are the economics of selling mules or other animals at the same time?