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Comment by DVassallo | Hacker News Reader

I did consider it. But I have a family and 2 small kids, and I promised my family that our lifestyle won't have to change while I do this experiment with my career.

We did seriously consider moving about 30 miles out of Seattle, where houses cost $350/sqft instead fo $500, but my family wasn't enthusiastic about being far away from our community, and it actually wouldn't have made that much of a difference to my runway.

If the circumstances were different, we could have made a different decision. But, in my situation I felt that I didn't have to.

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> and I promised my family that our lifestyle won't have to change while I do this experiment with my career.

That doesn't sound right at all.

Why not?

I don't have evidence to support my following claim, but I think that having a stable home life with a supporting family, not subjected to unusual bankruptcies or bad financial surprises, is a key element to startup founder success.

I could be mistaken. But I am a failed founder who disrupted their family and friends lives and lost a lot of goodwill while running the business because of it. So I think I'm at least right some of the time.

Regardless, it's wise to think of your loved ones first, even if it's only a cold business decision to do so; your business will thank you later with smoother revenues and a happier, more capable decision-making process down the road.

I'm not the above poster, but to me the desire to maintain a high standard of living when starting a business for the first time either means someone has a ton of money in reserve or they aren't very serious about starting a business. Now I can partially understand the situation if someone is buying a franchise or some existing business that will almost certainly have revenue from the start, but many of the tech business ideas discussed on HN require a fair amount of R&D before there's any revenue. For a first time entrepreneur I'm not sure 1 year is enough time to get up to speed and learn from mistakes.

OP here. Yes I have 5 years worth of expenses covered in liquid savings. My target is to make enough income to break even with my personal expenses before I run out of savings.

My wife is very conservative about any kind of change, but when it happens, she realizes it is not too bad, and most often even better.

This can be about something as big as where to buy a house to what security system to buy.

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