Fifteen Thousand Dollars a Month

My dad had surgery last week, so I flew to Mexico to help out. One night after my parents went to bed, I made a cup of tea, sat down at the kitchen table, and opened a spreadsheet I built months ago. The house was quiet. I had been putting this off for a while, but something about being there made it harder to keep avoiding. Watching your parents get older does something to how you think about time. If we're lucky, we all get there. And if we all get there, the question I've been circling in this series stops being abstract. How many working years do I have left, and how do I want to spend them?

The spreadsheet has my income, my expenses, my debt, and a formula at the bottom that answers one question: how much independent income do I need before I can walk away from my salary? I've opened it maybe three times since I built it. Each time I closed it faster than the time before. This time I made myself sit with it.

I want to share what I found. Not as advice. As the honest math of one person's situation.

I earn well into six figures. I've mentioned before that I earn good money. By most standards, it is. By the standards of someone carrying significant debt, living in one of the most expensive metro areas in the country, and supporting a household, it moves fast.

About a third of my take-home goes to housing. Another 13% goes to debt payments. Between utilities, insurance, food, transportation, and everything else that keeps a life running, about two-thirds of my income is committed before I make a discretionary choice.

That leaves a third. On paper, a third of a good salary sounds like plenty of room. But that third is supposed to cover retirement savings, investments, travel, the occasional thing that makes life more than a spreadsheet, and if I'm serious about this project, the runway to eventually replace my salary. The amount actually available to build toward leaving is a fraction of what's left over.

I have reasons for living where I live. The debt is real and already structured on the best terms I could get. These aren't luxuries. They're the cost of the life my wife and I have built over the years. I'm not trying to optimize a spreadsheet. I'm trying to build inside the constraints that actually exist.

So what does the exit number look like?

If I need to replace 70% of my current income to maintain something close to stability, not luxury, the target is somewhere between $140,000 and $150,000 per year. But that's before self-employment taxes and before health insurance.

Health insurance is the number nobody talks about until they have to. I've looked at marketplace plans for my area. For comparable coverage to what I have now through my employer, I'd be paying around $1,000 per month. Add self-employment taxes on top of that, and the real exit number climbs to roughly $175,000 to $180,000 per year. Around $15,000 per month.

I stared at that number for a long time. Fifteen thousand dollars a month, every month, before I can consider walking away from a paycheck. Sitting in my parents' kitchen in the city where I grew up, that number felt like it belonged to someone else's life. But it doesn't. It's mine.

A single product at $5/month needs about 3,000 paying users to cover that. That's not a side project. That's a business. At $10/month, it's roughly 1,500. At $50/month, about 300. Three or four smaller products, each generating $30K to $45K per year, is more realistic in some ways, but it means building and maintaining multiple products while working full-time. The income math might be friendlier, but the time math gets harder.

I built a section in the spreadsheet for this. Different price points, different numbers of paying users. Seeing it laid out made the scale real in a way that thinking about it never did.

One of those products already exists. It's live, it has users, and it charges $5 a month. I'll write about it soon.

The other thing the spreadsheet made clear is the timeline.

I've been in tech long enough to be realistic about how long it takes to build a product, find users, and reach meaningful revenue. I'm not looking at a six-month sprint. I'm looking at two to three years of building while employed, growing income gradually, and hitting a crossover point where the independent income is reliable enough to absorb the loss of a salary.

Two to three years. That's not discouraging. It's just real. And knowing it is better than the vague sense that "someday I'll figure it out," which is what keeps people in the comfortable enough trap I wrote about a few weeks ago.

I'm treating the spreadsheet as a direction, not a plan. It tells me roughly how far I need to go. The specific path will be messy and full of things I can't predict. But what the numbers gave me this week is something I didn't have before: a concrete answer to "what am I building toward?" Not a feeling. A number, a timeline, and a gap I need to close.

The gap is large. But it's a gap I can measure, which means it's a gap I can work on.

The spreadsheet is still open on my laptop. I haven't closed it this time.

This essay is part of Building My Way Out — a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment.