With a family, freelancing and consulting is your friend. It allows you the flexibility in schedule to pursue ideas and to work with other individuals that are

With a family, freelancing and consulting is your friend. It allows you the flexibility in schedule to pursue ideas and to work with other individuals that are in the start-up arena. You meet a lot of young companies in that line of work and you see a variety of problems. If you find a group who has an idea that you like but they cant provide a paying gig yet, you can scale your freelancing to provide the necessities while allowing you the free time to commit to a project. I freelance and consult for 3-4 days of my week, take weeks off at a time and still do well over 150k a year this gives me time to peruse the back log of ideas that me and two of my close friends have. I have 4 kids, a wife and grandparents that I take care of and I can say without a doubt that I have never felt more secure in my life than when I started freelancing. Well technically that is not true, I had a moderately sizable exit from the sale of a travel company that it gave me a nest egg, but even if that was not there, I would feel more secure than someone else making decisions about my future. Point being, get out of your day job and into freelancing first. Get to where you are working your 40hr week and another 40hr steady freelancing, this will allow you to build a nest egg while you are making the transition, then when you are getting 40hr a week freelancing and it is steady dump the day job, then start scaling your hours back freelancing until you meet an equilibrium of money to free-time to pursue projects.