If you're living in the US, $5k will not sustain a family lifestyle. After taxes and factoring in the risk inherent with a startup / SaaS business, if you want to depend on the revenue as a sole source of income, you're going to need to at least triple that.

I'm in France actually and used to live in Paris; but even there $5k (before company taxes, health care etc) we could not sustain our family.

In 2010, my wife and I (+ 1 kid, later 2) relocated to a rural place of France (north of Bordeaux), to improve the quality of life (more time with kids, nicer weather, nice countryside, cheaper houses) and to bootstrap a product.

Here our "required company income" per year (before taxes, excluding VAT, before healthcare etc) is 45k€ (approx $60,000, so $5k/mo), based on the last 3 years of historical data.

I use this feature of WiseCash to make sure we're on time with the revenue:

https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/track-your-income-exceed-you...

About risk: since my wife and I are fairly risk averse, we're actually managing to increase savings as we go, despite bootstrapping.

I have no idea how much life cost in rural places of the US, that said! Is it possible to feed a family in a very rural place with $5k?

Relocating to reduce financial pressure seems to be a good idea. We live in Paris and we need ~6k€/month to sustain current (frugal) lifestyle. This is mainly due to our monthly mortage payment (2k/month).

So at 500$ MRR I would most likely go from 5 days per week job to 4 days per week job in order to invest more in bootstrapping my business.

At 5k$ MRR I would quit my job.

At 50k$ MRR I would pay off the mortage earlier and start investing in order to increase passive earnings.

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.