Author here. My expenses are more like $150K a year, so my runway is only a few years. I have a family, two small kids (4 and 2), and live a comfortable life in Seattle. I could obviously adjust my standard of living, move somewhere cheaper, etc, but I didn't want my family to have to change anything from this experiment I'm doing with my life.

I hope you still have good health/life insurance. Maybe you are young but life changing events can happen to anyone as it did to me.

I do. Got a $5M life insurance, and disability insurance that pays $10K/month if I can't do my work anymore. Got a high deductible health insurance through the ACA exchange. Life and disability insurance were quite cheap actually: about $3K/year in total (age 35 and good health). Health insurance is obviously expensive. The cheapest is about $14K/year here in WA for a family of four (which is what I got). Deductible is about $7/$14K IIRC.

I understand you here. I just quit a financial startup. My runway is more than 10 years because I only have to take care my mother (Yeah, Single forever!). The real issue is mental health, that would lead to physical health if not aware!

hey man. just FYI i'd kill to be in your shoes.

- almost broke startup founder

I am also living in Seattle area with couple of kids and my expenses are in the same ballpark.

Someone used to spending ~500k a year is not going to want the quality of life change of moving to 40k a year income. Their family would also not appreciate it.

The best thing I ever did for the family budget is work out a plan ahead of time for windfall money. Odds are OP will never make this much money again. Spending like this is the new normal is how rock stars and athletes end up broke at 40. You have to get out ahead of it.

Since OP has a million saved I’m going to assume they had a similar plan in place. But. $150k a year with young kids (they haven’t begun to get expensive yet) in Seattle is pretty high. Getting that down is a good deal of effort that will distract from running the business.

>>Odds are OP will never make this much money again.

I hope these kind of things are taught to people early. Somewhere in school, or may be at a level of a social value system. The default every day mode for most people is to work very hard and fail. In fact you are lucky to achieve mediocre success even after working insanely hard.

>>The best thing I ever did for the family budget is work out a plan ahead of time for windfall money.

Yes the best thing to do in case of a windfall period is to take all the money and put it into some kind of an investment. So that when the gravy train stops, you have something to fall back on.

>>Spending like this is the new normal is how rock stars and athletes end up broke at 40. You have to get out ahead of it.

It isn't just rock stars and athletes, its your every day cousins and uncles, who have some career run, spend like no tomorrow, when the gravy train stops, they realize they have their best years behind them, all their money is gone, and nothing that they can do will help them even get by, let alone take them back to their past glory.

>>$150k a year with young kids (they haven’t begun to get expensive yet) in Seattle is pretty high. Getting that down is a good deal of effort that will distract from running the business.

A lot of people will be willing to show sympathy to you if you met with an accident and bad things happened to you beyond you control. But if you threw away a perfectly fine opportunity and asked them to settle for less, they would be asking why should they even be doing it at all.

True. It's hard to regress on the standard of living, especially with a family. I wasn't spending $500K/year though :) I still made sure I abundantly lived within my means.

Perhaps, he was earning 500k but not spending that much. 500k would give you around 300k after tax. Half of 300k can easily be spent in order to have normal life.

And have to live like a normal person, no high-rolling.