Stop thinking like a poor person. Seriously. It will comprehensively undermine your efforts to not be poor. (Learning how to fake being upper class is one of the best reasons to go to college, by the way. I didn't exactly do polo when I was younger, but I've learned enough to hide obvious traces of that in professional situations. Simplest possible example: watch how successful businessmen act when told "No" by someone in a position of momentary authority versus how poor people act. The magic word is "options", as in "OK, what are my options?" There are almost always options, no matter how much the DMV clerk/airline CS drone/etc is saying policy this and rules that.)

Running a business is not coextensive with underpaying people. Heck, running a business isn't coextensive with having employees. I've been doing this for a couple of years and nobody but myself goes hungry if I don't make payroll -- when I need something done, I buy it from another small business and at the end of the day I pay them what we agreed on and we're even. On the other end of the scale, there are many people on HN who pay their employees quite well indeed and who still do quite well for themselves. (While they're not exactly as prevalent on HN as they are in the real world, there are a lot of 5 man software companies busy cranking out boring systems which do boring things that make boring seven figures a year in profit and have boring sharing arrangements where the employees make boring bonuses and the principals sleep on boring piles of gold coins.)

A talent for obsessive optimization is a gift in running your own business, as long as you also get stuff done. I have known people who are born optimizers and I also know people who are just lazy. If you're just lazy, business may not be for you.