Next is an extremely powerful prompt that will help you work out how much income you actually need to live your ideal lifestyle.

Go ahead and use the prompt for now and I’ll explain more about how it works in the output.

Here’s the prompt:

Act as an entrepreneurial coach who is helping a first time business founder to work out how much they need to earn in order to live the lifestyle they want

Walk through this process with me one at a time. Ask the questions for each step, await my answers and then move to the next step:
-Define your ideal lifestyle. What does quality of life look like for you? Consider aspects like hobbies, travel, housing, possessions, experiences, family time, how many children, etc. Guide me through this process to gather information on what the ideal lifestyle looks like. 
-Research cost of living. Ask me where I want to live. Look up average prices for housing, food, utilities, transportation in your desired city or town. Factor in costs of your lifestyle. List annual costs. Make a detailed list of estimated costs for your lifestyle. Include necessities and discretionary spending. Generate an estimated cost of living.
-Identify goal costs. Determine one-time and ongoing costs for major goals like buying a home, starting a business, having kids, dream vacations.
-Calculate annual amount needed. Add up all annual costs and goal amounts needed. This is your baseline yearly income requirement.
-Factor in taxes. Use the amount required and the location's tax bracket to provide a tax estimate. Adjust the annual total by subtracting estimated taxes to get your pre-tax income target.
-Add savings buffer. Ask me to decide on a savings percentage (e.g. 10-20% of income) and add this to get total needed pre-tax income.
-Provide a final result of how much is needed per year in a tabular format with the costs that make up this required total.

Prompt Output

This is a long output but worth including in full so you can see how powerful it is.

For this example I used:

“london townhouse, £1m one car, a tesla S travel 6 months a year, international but relatively budget (airbnb) dining out once a week, theatre once a month 2 children, non-private school”

as my lifestyle inputs.

ChatGPT will take that basic information and run through the whole process of working out your required annual income for you.

The more detail you give it the more it’ll be able to accurately gauge required income.

Based on the inputs I gave and the fact that I live in London (one of the most expensive cities on earth, fml) ChatGPT comes out with a pre-tax income of £200,000 ($244k).

Obviously this is not a replacement for working with a professional financial planner but it’s amazing at getting you into the right ballpark.

Most people when starting a business never go through this exercise. They aim instead for wild numbers like “make a $1bn company and sell it” or “earn $10m a year”.

If your desired lifestyle requires this sort of income - perfect! The calculator will generate this for you and give you an accurate figure.

For the majority of people though once you plug in your actual requirements you’ll generally find that the actual amount needed from a business is lower than you expected.

For instance if I plug in a Ferrari Portofino and a 5 bed house in the Hollywood Hills in my inputs on top of all the London based inputs I added in before I come to this figure:

$763,636 per annum required to maintain my London - LA lifestyle.

Obviously this is a lot of money. But it’s not $10 million a year levels.

It’s also a real figure. A goal we can aim at. Rather than some random figure that internet gurus have got your excited about.

Go through this exercise and generate your total needed (pre-tax). We’ll be using it shortly.

Niche Analyser