I run this like a bonafide business and pay the taxes as needed. Oddly enough when I moved here to Florida and talked to the people in charge of licensing, they determined that since we are on agriculturally zoned land and were breeding animals for sale, we are technically classed as being a "farm" instead of an actual "business". But I still do the tax forms as a business...
Actually I believe you cannot depreciate APPRECIATING assets, which is what the breeding stock actually is. Now if you bought them as adults, then perhaps you could, but raising them up from babies, already deducting all the expenses associated with raising them, then you really don't have anything to depreciate in them. They are INCREASING in value as they get older, up to a point.
The problem with trying to come up with writeoffs is that this normally means spending money for some sort of investment or business asset for that writeoff. I would really like to set as much money as possible aside for retirement. That is a BIG unknown for us. Who the heck knows how long we will live? So how do you work out an accurate budget over a period of time that is unknowable? So we will just have to make a guess. If we outlive our estimate, then I don't know what the heck would come next. If we fall short of the estimate, well we just leave money on the table for the beneficiaries in our will. Probably a little bit miffed that we might have been able to do a bit more each year with some extra money, though...
Kind of disconcerting how many decisions there are to make in life that are unknowable until looking back in hindsight, when it is too late to do anything about it.
