As per the title! :P 

* How much do you set aside for ticketing, shows etc?
* Does this cost increase/decrease at any stage throughout training your horse/dog?
* Overall, how much would you say you have spent to reach your goal (1 mill, 2 mill points etc) 

xo

Nothing because I don't ticket or buy private shows. :P I try to keep at least 10mil on any account with animals on it, just in case something comes up, but otherwise it goes to my retirement to be saved for future upgrades. 

I don't ticket because it costs too much RL money, but maybe one day. In that case, you're looking at billions of HPD to get to 8 mill or higher.

As for shows... horse show spots are usually 500k, dog show spots are 250k. If you buy 2 spots in 80 horse shows, that's 80 mill per week. 100 mill if you have 100 shows. For dogs, it's half the price, so 40 mill for 2 spots in 80 shows weekly, or 50 mill for 2 spots in 100 shows. If you have your own accounts, that equals to more money in your pocket. However, if you're buying spots from others, I don't recommend leaving the shows unused while your main private pair is retired/the baby is underage. Spots can be hard to come by, so best hold on to them and throw in a different pair until your preferred one is of training age.

You can literally get to 1 mill-1.5 mill on public training alone, but anything higher requires some amount of privates. I think you can get to 2 mill with 20 private shows/60 public. I've gotten horses to 5 mill on 80 shows. Bear in mind that the higher the generation, the more points it has at birth (besides the parents' contribution), so each generation gets a little boost. Hence how my lined Finnhorse mare is at 7.2 mill at 19 on 100 weekly private shows. Her store mate is at 6.5 mill by comparison.

I honestly don't really budget things out too hard and fast? I know I'll have a nice chunk of change from selling my tix every month on all five of my uppies and from selling the shows I'm not planning on using personally, but I also have the added income of graphics, which more than covers my training expenses so long as I sell at least 4-5 a month. I ticketed a few animals a while back just to make sure a store mate would match up with a high-pointed pup but like Tana said it's very expensive and so I wouldn't invest too heavily in it unless I'd saved up/made plans for a project.

I haven't put any IRL $$ into HP besides my personal upgrades and a few deages/breeding boosts/permanent energy.

In complete honesty, I don't set aside very much for training anymore. When I first started, I did major bulks of private shows and ticket training to get them to mass points, but like Tana said, it gets REALLY expensive and I was flushing out a ton of money (both HPD and real life money) for my horses. But after foundation, I literally just started my own training routine that's worked out. All my horses have gotten 1.5 - 1.7mil on it depending on their TBP (total birth points) and ABP (achievement birth points) "boost" like Tana said.

How I train is I start off by registering for Clubs - or if you're already registered - and entering their shows weekly. This in itself is 2000 points if I remember (don't quote me on that) and then I slam the rest of their energy with publics. For example: If a horse has 80 energy, I'll get Club shows ( which leaves me at 70 - 50 depending the amount there are) then I do publics till 0 energy. I will also buy extra energy every now and again too to make sure they get in these shows for a decent impact. And sometimes I will buy tickets from other players, but really since they only give 75 points, you spend a ton on them (again like Tana said) to really make an impact, so I mainly use H-Tixs when I'm close to a number to "bump" them. So like if I have a horse at 1,698,980 points then I would buy tickets to make that round to 1.7mil before they age up.

But as of late and limited time I don't even enter Club shows all that often anymore; my G3 generation (Wicked Kharma x The Midnight Traveller) I solely did public shows with nothing else except a bit of extra energy here and there and they both retired with 1.5mil. This is the minimum number of which I'll let a pair hit to keep good points on the line and my G4 Stallion, Wicked at Midnight was born with 109k before ABP. He's currently at 438k @ 5yrs old just on publics alone and if I continue to train consistently, he would retire at around 1.4 - 1.5mil like his parents by breeding age (20yrs for my lines).

Most of my dogs have a goal of 1m points, and to do that I don't budget out anything because most dogs hit 1m by 13 in my general experience. I've had a few gain slower, but not too much and they always go over their goal by retirment. For my private lines, I try to keep all dogs at 3-5m or more. I don't ticket (I did ticket one of my last Shepherds, but I only let myself spend $200m because after doing the math I realized for me, personally, and this particular pixel - it just wasn't worth it. She wasn't a 'project' dog and is just part of my private showed lines.

For my private showed lines - I always try to deage by two years, and I do always add permanent extra energy to them (6-12 HPB per dog, depending of if I deage or not) and I keep them all in 100 privates a week. At 250k a spot, the average price I pay out per week is: 100m per week for shows alone. Which ends up being 1 billon 500m per generation.

holy crap that's a lot of money, Con

Thank you so much to everyone who has given me feedback, it's been really helpful. And it's certainly opened my eyes to how much I need to budget/set aside O.o