$20K Monthly income - Bootstrap Journey. The crazy realities of Business and Family Finance!

Ok so Navigating the entrepreneurial waters is crazy! This startup stuff is wake up call to keeping your budgeting in check! 😂 So 10 yrs of trial and error, culminating in a steady 20k/month from various income streams—e-commerce, affiliate marketing, network marketing, and wellness programs. So where does it all go when you are starting a business and have a family of 5. This means anyone can do this..😳 Income Streams: Generating residual income from a variety of sources, including e-commerce, affiliate marketing, network marketing, and wellness programs. We have grown lots of businesses and the most profitable so far is network/affiliate marketing with residual income. About 12k comes from it. Business Setup: SCorp LLC with payroll so you can bring your taxable income down. Not tax advice but I don’t ever owe at the end of the year. Keep everything in your business and transfer if you need it as an income (bonus) Budget Breakdown: Total: $3500/month - Developer Salary:$1500-2K/month - AWS:$200 - Replicate Serverless GPU: $100 - APIs: $300 - Advertising:None (still in the test phase) Personal Finance: Pay our self first and then save for operations, taxes, emergency etc.): Remaining balance ($20k - $3500 = $16,500) We use about $10000 for salaries in our other businesses and the rest $6500 approx is for Living/operations/tax etc. Additional Finances: - Frontend Designer: $500/month - AWS Sagemaker: Very pricey; exploring alternatives. (Almost paid 1K for a week of an instance) - Replicate Serverless GPU: Cost-effective alternative. Approx. $100 a month - Websites/Hosting: $20/month - Digital Ocean (Mongo + Storage): $75/month Total Monthly Startup Expenses: $2500 -$3500 = $1000 Remaining Budget for startup: $1000 Tips for Staying on Budget: 1. Develop a Budget: Clearly outline your monthly expenses. Learn how to do it. 2. Friendly Relations with Developers: Build a strong, collaborative relationship with your development team. Because they can cut you breaks, find lesser expensive platforms and of course pay them regularly. 😃 3. Treat Your Team as Family:Cultivate an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding. My son is starting to help us with the Marketing. 4. Exploration of Free Tiers: Make the most of free trials and open-source alternatives. just create alerts for the peace of mind..Crazy to wake up to a huge bill..like Sagemaker 😂 5. Serverless Solutions: Opt for serverless options for cost-effectiveness. This is the new frontier of paying less..only use what you need. 6. Family Schedule First: Establish a family schedule and integrate business hours. Seriously treat the business as less important than your family. You will thank me later. 7. Morning Routine without Phones: Begin the day with a phone-free morning routine. Everything is a fire and we end up paying more money on a whim when we have these phones in our hands. 8. Self-Care Time:Dedicate time for self-care amid this crazy hustle. It is ok for you to take time and decompress from work & family. Sleep some too😂 9. Date Nights: For the ones with partners..this is a no brainer.Nurture personal relationships with dedicated date nights. It will help with the people that are supposed to support you. 10. Regular Monitoring: Keep a close eye on resource usage to avoid unexpected costs. Budget Alerts or even smoke signals to help you keep cost down. The startup journey is a meticulous one, filled with its unique set of challenges and triumphs. Can anyone relate? What are you doing to keep sane? 😂