Don't keep score by how much you make; keep score by how little you spend

Yet another mistake to avoid when going from Corporate to Indie - which ties into some of the other mistakes I've written about, like hubris and team size - is spending money.

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I suppose this depends a bit on why you went indie. If you decided to become an indie game developer to see if you could make a lot of money, then you could throw some money at it to see if it sticks and then go back to your high paying corporate job and it would end up costing you less in the long run. (Or there's that one in a thousand chance you actually make a ton of money, in which case, again, spending money might be a great investment.) But if, like me, you decided to go indie because you wanted your freedom, because you wanted to stop working for The Man, then read on...because spending less money usually means spending more time, and for me that's great, because I want to prolong my indie adventure as long as possible.

Lately I've come across the blog of Mr. Money Mutache and I really like the cut of the guy's jib. We're kindred spirits in a lot of ways - saved up quite a bit, quit our jobs before the crash, started businesses that didn't work out so well, have families, and try to keep our spending frugal. But Mr. Money Mustache spent less than half as much as me each year and has thus been able to maintain his financial freedom while I am going to have to either increase my indie revenue or go back and work for the man again. If I had been like MMM after I quit, and the Fristrom-Pascual family had really tightened our belts, we could keep doing this indefinitely even on the average indie salary of $25K / year.

Put another way - there's two ways you can make your indie game development company viable: making more than you spend or spending less than you make.

People tend to focus on the first. But the second works too, as heroes like Jason Rohrer show.

There's lots of advice and ways to cut costs on your game development (work from home; use hardware that's a couple years old; use free software; pay only with rev share) but that's a tiny part of the picture, right? The real cost is the cost of supporting yourself and your family.

And Mr. Money Mustache has a lot of good advice on how to keep that down. I highly recommend checking him out and other frugality websites. 

But here's some of the stuff I'm doing lately. (Better late than never.) I switched from using Quicken to using You Need A Budget last year, kind of by coincidence, and because You Need A Budget puts the Budget part front-and-center I suddenly realized with embarrassment just how much the Fristrom-Pascual family spends each month. It also didn't let me pat myself on the back just because I'd had one good month out of several, which Quicken did. I'm not even going to say what our monthly budget was because it's so embarrassing - I'll just say that even though I thought I was being frugal, I was still acting like I had my Activision salary.

One thing we did even before I discovered MMM: every line item on our budget that was optional?We cut that in half: Date night. Restaurants. Fun Spending. Even Groceries. The kids' extracurricular classes (Sofia was in a highfalutin' dance class that, in hindsight, was for rich kids. It's Boys'n'Girls club classes for you now, Sofia.)

Turns out it was easy. The only target we couldn't hit was groceries, but we did get it down from over $800/month to $550, which, from what I hear, is pretty impressive for a family of four in Bellevue. But even there, there's still room for improvement. We could eat oatmeal more often, and I don't really need two six-packs of beer a month ... and I've quit drinking coffee before, I could do it again ...

After we'd done that, our monthly budget was starting to look reasonable. I patted myself on the back and said that was probably as cheap as we could go. (Because, you know, Jason Rohrer's lifestyle looks so out of reach it gives me that why-even-try feeling, like when I look at the highest scores on the Geometry Wars leaderboards.)

But that's when I came across Mr. Money Mustache (via You Need A Budget, btw) - and realized there was so much further we could go! There's still some big ticket items we can take care of!

There's No Such Thing As The Fastest Code? How about: There's No Such Thing As The Cheapest Budget. (I bet even Jason Rohrer looks at his monthly spending and thinks, "We could really cut back here." sometimes.)

We can get cheaper health insurance. (The ACA has prodded us into doing this anyway...turns out the kids are eligible for Washington's Medicare.)

And wait! Why do I have disability insurance? I was talked into this years ago. "What if you lost the ability to earn an income, Jamie?" That would be tragic sure, but my particular disability insurance doesn't just cover my ability to earn in income, it covers a whole bunch of stupid shit. And I was paying $2000 a year for it. Basically, unless I lose both my hands or my sight or my mind, I'm still going to be able to do what I do, and that's pretty darn unlikely (and if it does happen, I'm sure my extended family will rally around to help us), so - screw the disability insurance. (I still have life. That's a lot cheaper.)

And Cathy and I have a rule to make sure our businesses are actually businesses and not hobbies that sometimes pay for themselves - whatever they make the previous month, the most we allow ourselves to spend on them the next month is half of that. (This is more important for Catshy Crafts than Happion Labs - I've always been cheap when it came to game development, prefering to invest time over money.)

And, hey - how about we cut all those optional line items in half AGAIN? And get cheaper internet? And cut back to one disc at a time with Netflix? And lower the heat? And turn off the freaking lights and television when we leave the room? Now our budget starts to look less embarrassing: we've cut our spending by over 30%!

What else can we do? We can refinance our home loan. We can sell that second car. (We almost never both drive somewhere different at the same time - that $500/year in insurance+maintenance is an astronomical Per Use cost.) We can ditch our smart phones. (Wait, MMM gets $10 iphones? We'll have to look into that when my current contract is up.)

And the weird thing? Giving up these luxuries is inexplicably making me happier. I don't know why - maybe I've genetically inherited my mom's stoicism and just didn't realize it until now - or maybe it's because I get a kick of moving up on the how-little-we-spend leaderboards. Anyhow, so far, it's not a hardship.

Long and short of it is, if we can cut our spending by 30-50%, we can be indie 30-50%...or more... longer. Rock.