Stress is non-existent now (apart from worrying about family etc). Pay was 0 for the first 3 months - that was scary, but I had some savings and I had an idea I was happy to go along with. My family was against me, but eventually got on board (after a year!). Now pay is an order of magnitude larger than my best salary as an investment banker (1.5 years later). My focus is now technology - it's my passion and I'm good at it. My clients still come primarily from finance, but now have one in healthcare too. I'm also starting to put together a few products I want to sell. Trying to grow organically, with a small team. I don't really want a big team; just a small team of really high quality people that can turn their hand to any task. Overall it's been enjoyable, but the start was tricky (especially because everyone around me thought I'd fail and end up back in a similar investment banking job). It's not for everyone, but at the time, I was so unhappy within myself, that I didn't really have another option.

I am also interested in the route you took, so I wonder if you would be open to talking about how you found your first clients?

Sure drop me an email via my company website and ask away :)

Cheers I will do that!

I'm not the person you replied to, but in early 2015, after a company went down from under me three months after I started, I figured out that maybe it was a bad idea to go join another one. I've been consulting, between twenty and thirty billable hours a week, ever since.

Pay: A little less. But I'm working about half the hours. I've had time to start a little side company and to work on another I'm most of the way through, as well as explore other maybe-careers (photography, videography, audio) without impacting my cash flow. I spend a little less money, but some of that is willing: I'm not at work, I don't have to pay $10 for lunch, I can make a small salad. I've had no trouble keeping up my retirement accounts. If I retire.

Stress: much lighter overall, but the occasional terror-spike. Finding work is challenging, and there have been dry spots that made me very antsy, but I enjoy it, and the company I do most of my work through is good at keeping me busy without having to spend my time on sales. I'm moving in with my girlfriend, and that'll just about halve my expenses while placing me in a much more convenient/walkable area, so this should go down further. (She is sometimes a little miffed that I work so little. But I cook, and I cook pretty well, and I'm paying rent, so.)

If you have an in-demand skillset, you can do very well. For me, it's devops, but it's devops informed with the way that I've done everything else in a tech group, from web and mobile to databases, so I'm not approaching it either from a sysadmin point of view or some dogmatic Agile-esque one, and I can help in a lot of ways.

Also, shameless plug: i'm always willing to chat with new prospective clients. ;) Email's in my profile.

Thanks for all of the detail! Your parting parenthetical is something I find myself doing to people too, but in reality maybe we all ought to work less.