Good planning and great use of your own tool. $5k a month is enough in many rural spots in the US to support a small family. However, there's a different issue

Good planning and great use of your own tool. $5k a month is enough in many rural spots in the US to support a small family. However, there's a different issue - it's the inherent risk and unpredictability of a startup. And opportunity cost. Basically, there's a non-trivial likelihood that the startup revenues could diminish or disappear. There are many reasons for this - churn rate, unsustainable customer acquisition costs, market changes, a new competitor emerging offering a free product, who knows. As a result, if you are counting on the startup as your sole source of income, you need to "pad" this with the expected downside risk. If there's a 50% chance of income going to zero in two years, then you need to double your $5k to be able to have the "excess" income now to be able to weather the potential zero-income later. In this way, over 2 years, you will still have $5k a month, even if revenue goes to 0 in year 2. Make sense? The larger the likelihood of failure, the greater this risk-multiplier. Also, there's the Opportunity Cost trade off. If you can work for someone else with minimal risk and get the same $5k versus work your butt off carrying all the same risk for the same $5k, which would you choose? The "safer" $5k will always win. In such case, comparing $5k in startup revenues to $5k in salary is not a direct comparison. If you are working twice as hard for the same $5k with twice as much risk, you should be earning twice as much. Otherwise, just do the "easier" job. This is not as much a financial calculation as a Real Opportunity Cost calculation. This is why I often say - if you want to replace your salaried job with startup revenue as a sole source of income, take your monthly salary, multiply it by three, and this is what your monthly SaaS revenue should be to weather future potential downside and account for greater risk for the same reward.