Last Updated on May 20, 2026 by
The hardest financial question you’ll face as a Founder isn’t about your business. It’s about you.
When I launched SBO Financial as a side hustle, I had a salary to fall back on. When I went full-time, that safety net vanished. No income. A finite pool of savings. A business that wasn’t yet profitable enough to pay me a cent.
That experience forced me to do something most Founders never do: get completely honest about the minimum amount of money I needed to live on. Not thrive. Not maintain my pre-business lifestyle. Just live comfortably enough to stay in the game.
That’s when I coined the term Minimum Viable Lifestyle.
Understanding your personal financial floor has never been more important for Founders considering the leap.
What is MVL (Minimum Viable Lifestyle)?
You’ve probably heard of Minimum Viable Product (MVP), made popular by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. The concept is simple: build the smallest, cheapest version of your product that still delivers real value to your early customers.
MVL applies the same logic to your personal finances.
The goal is to design your lifestyle around the lowest viable cost that still gives you a satisfying quality of life. Not poverty. Not deprivation. Just a conscious, intentional filter on what you spend money on, and why.
The key word is satisfactory. An MVL means making small, deliberate sacrifices that still allow you to live well. It’s about stripping out the impulse spending and low-utility expenses that quietly drain your runway without adding anything meaningful to your day-to-day life.
How to Calculate Your MVL
Here’s how to do it in three steps.
1. Categorise your spending.
Export your bank and credit card statements for the last month into a spreadsheet. Organise your expenses into four categories:
- Food and entertainment
- Housing
- Transportation
- Everything else
The goal isn’t extreme detail. It’s a clear baseline of what your current lifestyle actually costs. Anything that doesn’t fit neatly into the first three categories goes into “other.” Here’s a quick reference:
| Category | Common Examples |
|---|---|
| Food & Entertainment | Groceries, dining out, streaming subscriptions, events, takeaway |
| Housing | Rent or mortgage repayments, utilities, internet, home insurance |
| Transportation | Fuel, public transport, vehicle registration, car insurance |
| Everything Else | Clothing, personal subscriptions, health, personal care, gifts |
2. Conduct a lifestyle review.
With your expenses categorised, ask yourself, and your partner if relevant, which of these are genuinely necessary? Which ones, if removed, would meaningfully reduce your quality of life?
Be realistic, not ruthless. The biggest gains are usually found in food and entertainment. Moving date night from weekly to monthly, for example, is a small adjustment that can free up several hundred dollars a month.
Identify the unnecessary items, remove them, and recalculate your monthly total. That new number is your MVL budget.
3. Add a buffer.
Once you have your revised lifestyle expenses, add a 30% margin to account for personal tax obligations and an emergency savings buffer.
This final figure is your monthly MVL.
How long is your personal runway?
Now that you have your MVL, the next step is calculating how long your savings will actually last.
Divide your total savings by your monthly MVL. The result is the number of months you have before your savings run out.
When I started SBO, I had around $30,000 in savings and an MVL of approximately $3,000 per month. That gave me 10 months of runway: 10 months for the business to generate enough to pay me a wage.
That number became my anchor. Every decision I made in those first 10 months was filtered through it.
Using your MVL to make better financial decisions
Whether you’re thinking about starting a business or already running one, your MVL is a powerful decision-making tool. Once you know your number, you can start answering questions like:
- How much runway do I have before I need to draw a personal salary from the business?
- What is the minimum revenue my business needs to generate to pay me a wage?
- How much can I reinvest into growth before I need to prioritise owner drawings?
Even if you’re not planning a business transition, a periodic audit of your personal lifestyle costs is a worthwhile exercise. You’ll often find expenses that have quietly accumulated without contributing much to your actual quality of life.
As the designer Francis Jourdain once said:
“One can furnish a room very luxuriously by taking out furniture, rather than putting it in.”
Frequently Asked Questions
👉 Ready to get clarity on your personal and business financial position? We’ll review your numbers, help you understand your runway, and give you a clear picture of what it actually takes to scale profitably.
