I’m not spending (over) $1500 on a hobby… My tenants pay me, and I turn around and pay their money straight to Linden Lab. I spend nothing. The issue is that my region billing dates are clustered, so it can take time for the L$ coming in to catch up. For YEARS this has not been a problem. In fact I’ve had a land business for over 10 years and managed to stay open and up/downsize as needed. I’ve had mostly happy customers, a few unhappy as one does with any business, but one thing I’ve never done was shut down any regions without giving notice, moving and/or refunding affected tenants. If you have followed the SL land business at all over the years I would think you would remember the many land barons who have closed down in epic disasters where people logged in to find their land completely gone even though they were paid up for months. Sure, SL has a pretty low bar of entry for starting a business, but if I was utterly incompetent, I would not have lasted this long. For a few years I lived on profits from multiple SL businesses, but with the decline of SL those days are long gone. If anything, I'm just too optimistic and/or stubborn to give up.
I have considered closing my business and helping my tenants find new arrangements, mostly because I don’t login much anymore. However, since it hasn’t required much work for me to break even and occasionally clear a small profit, and since my best friend wants to keep his builds up and keeps talking me out of it, I stay. However, every time LL makes some boneheaded change I am reminded of why SL is such a terrible platform to do business. They make it not worth it to do business with them, and yeah maybe my money would be a "small" loss but as long as they keep not caring about "small" customers, SL will continue to decline. (Side note any company who considers a customer who brings in over $1000/mo for them "small" is a big part of what's wrong with American capitalism. If they don't care about me, what about the person with $20/mo in mainland? Every customer should be valued.)
I would not close because of this, but I would because of the homestead debacle, adult content fiasco, gaming regulation disaster, consistent failure to stop copybotters, scammers, stalkers and abusers... every time I think they've finally learned, they f up things for business owners yet again. This is just another straw, and a small one in comparison to the others I listed, but for me maybe it will break the camel's back.