10k MRR no debt solo biz more or less means retirement in a high COL country. I would worry about maximizing your odds of success
Without context, this could either be very nice or not remotely feasible. A charitable take would be that you have next to no expenses, and some other personal salary or have another household income, and you own your own home, and you're basically already prepared to retire anyway and this would be an amount that you'd be able to earn in perpetuity, then... maybe?
But if it lasts only a few years then that's just a nice boost to savings or a down payment on a small condo. In my high CoL city, if you earned the equivalent of a flat $10k/m after tax and managed to get it all up front, and not have to spend any of it on literally anything else, then you'd be able to pay cash for a townhome and be back to needing at least a few grand a month for living out the rest of however many decades you have.
It's retirable money if it's the floor of what you earn over the course of an entire working life, or some other variables prove favorable, but I guess it's quite bleak how not far that money goes these days.
Or an expensive drug habit, or paying loan sharks, etc.
I don't agree, or at least it depends what "a very good life" looks like, but that's not the point, and I think it's just a strangely framed association between MRR and retirement, which is usually discussed in terms of an aggregate at some specific point.
If I make $10k a month as revenue and take it all as salary, I'm left with probably ~$7k or less after taxes, assuming I'm not paying an accountant, doing all my own paperwork, all the usual caveats. That's potentially a great salary depending on lots of factors, but it's only a retirable amount if a very healthy portion of that goes directly to retirement savings/investment. If you don't own a home yet, it's easily possible that $2-4k of that could go right into shelter costs, $1-2k to miscellaneous daily expenses and bills or transit. It's great if you're single, own a home, have no dependents, are frugal, have roommates etc... and as an income in retirement at a typical retirement age, it's probably pretty great in many cases, but as a young person you'd need to keep it up for a few decades consistently to retire on it, and idk how safe a bet it is that a small project would continue earning that money long term.
All of that might be implied, or it might not, idk anything about the person who posted it originally, but $10k a month after paying for a high CoL mortgage or rent, food, a kid, I just don't see it. $10k a month USD living in SF? $10k a month AUD living in Sydney? What about $10k a month CAD living in London?
There's just not enough information to make such a confident assertion, imho.
†Fact check: not top 99.97 I as originally stated, just top 99.9 according to https://docs.dpaq.de/17706-global-wealth-report-2021-en.pdf - $1M threshold = top 1.1%; $5M threshold = top 12% of the 1.1%
Yes, in theory, and in most cases, among many others.
The rest of your comment provides useful context, and I agree, it's a great place to shoot for and build from, such that if it grows to those numbers it's certainly possible to rely on in full retirement mode.
The great American philosopher Russ Hanneman comes into mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oV4IVy8tvE
Describing mortgage payments as a scam seems pretty out there. Renting isn’t any cheaper, and with a mortgage at least your home is an investment
That's not even an engineering salary, and you haven't factored in operational costs. It needs to be higher than this. And there's also no guarantee the business will last.
Plenty of people retire without engineering salaries in the US. $5k/month after taxes and expenses can be enough (or it can be a fraction of what you need).
Agree that thinking of it as a never ending money tap is the bigger issue.
But yeah if you gave me $10k/month pre-tax today (assuming it was never-ending) I’d be done working for the rest of my life.
The main issue with this narrative is that social security is on track to be insolvent in less than a decade. If that happens, then the long-tail of regular non-rich people are going to be in a world of hurt.