About a year ago, I took the step toward leaving my full-time job in order to bootstrap my own business. I had to do a lot of learning on my feet for practical, small tidbits that aren’t mentioned or taught in the usual popular entrepreneurship articles. But now that I’ve gotten there, I figure I’d share the advice with you.

How Wealthy You Are Depends on Your Unit Expenses.

As you may have learned in school, a “unit” typically means numbers of varying digits. So 1, 10, 100, and 1,000 are all different examples of units.

Unit expenses then are values of say $1, $10, $100, and $1,000. The way these hurt both depend on the size (a $5 purchase versus a $5,000 purchase) and their value ($5,000 in investing in a high quality work computer is more justifiable than $5,000 on fancy clothes). So, as you can expect, when you’re independent you want to round up and make as many of your expenses either small or valuable (preferably small and valuable, though this happens rarely).

Of course, there’s one other thing you have to look out for…

A Single Unit Expense Won’t Kill You. A Recurring Unit Expense Might.

As much as it pains me to say this, GaryVee has a great (and often misinterpreted) example on the dangers of recurring expenses.

Let’s look at a nice cup of coffee from Starbucks. For sake of argument, we’ll say it’s 5 dollars. A single cup of Starbucks coffee might hurt your diet, but it won’t hurt your paycheck. Even as an independent without a stable source of income, you can forgive yourself in splurging by buying the occasional cup of coffee.

Then it becomes a habit.

Let’s say you’ve grown to fit Starbucks coffee into your routine. It’s a ritual for you, to every morning go out and grab your 5 dollar cup of Starbucks. At the end of the year, you gasp in shock — you spent almost two thousand dollars on coffee!

Your innocent 1 digit expense turned out to be a four digit monster, one that is ruinously impactful and, besides the mental health value of your routine, mostly meaningless. You got got by the recurring unit.

The same reason companies all moved towards subscription purchases — including probably the company you’re making yourself — is the same reason you should never buy a subscription. Subscriptions turn into an avalanche of revenue for the seller, and an avalanche of expense for the buyer. And while you can argue that some subscriptions provide just enough value to satisfy their stealthily large costs, pay close attention to price bumps — there may come a time where it stops being so helpful after all.

Alas, there’s two recurring expenses you’ll never get rid of.

The Two Things That Kill All Entrepreneurs (Or Why You Shouldn’t Start A Company in San Francisco).

If I had enough time, I’d wage a war over food and shelter costs. These are the only two expenses you will ever have that 1) are always high impact, 2) are recurring on top of being impactful*,* and 3) you will never be able to live without them. Seriously, now that I’m an entrepreneur I’m starting to think Kaczynski was right: imagine how many people would be able to live out their dreams if we went back to all living in huts and farming the land. Sure we’d lose a few during the winter famine, but it would all be worth it.

In all seriousness, this means that food and shelter are two things that should be scrutinized constantly in order to make sure you’re optimizing for low impact and high value. For food, get the bare minimum of what you need, and make sure it’s good for you — fortunately the foods that are most nutritious for your body also tend to be the cheapest [1]. For shelter, this can be tough — most of us live with a significant other which makes simply moving to a cheaper place a lot harder than it looks. In this case, just make sure to always be making hard and fast rules on where you move — the prices, the amenities, etc.

Now the good news is that, despite your fears, you’re probably not going to end up homeless even if this entrepreneurship thing doesn’t work out and you get eaten by expenses. You may need to bow back down to corporate overlords, but this isn’t so bad — just a minor deviation off the track.

[1] – I’m aware food prices tend to be a point of high contention, and I don’t want to spend much time talking about it here since its off the topic of the post. As a rule, I see vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains all as very cheap. Meat is where it gets complicated. Frozen meats are cheap, but they’re mostly seen as being more “junky”. Rice and beans are cheap, but for many of us carnivores they just aren’t a suitable option. Personally, I just bite the bullet and spend a lot of money each month on lean cuts of chicken.