As a husband and dad, my advice would be to make the jump now before you have a family to support. It will be much more difficult later in life when you have to worry about being “responsible” :)

If the new opportunities at work do not pan out, do you think it would be a situation where you might be able to work part-time at your current job and devote more time to blogging? That could provide a transition period into being a “pro” blogger.

Right now my blogs do not make anywhere near enough to support my family so I will be grinding it out until the day is here where I can make that decision.

I look forward to hearing more about what you decide to do.

Our company is of the opinion that bonuses and raises should be announced, then held back for several months as an incentive to keep people around. Yes, it’s that bad. I am currently looking and hope to have more news soon!

Whichever you choose, I wish you the best of luck!

Otherwise you would have already quit, since you make much more from your side business. If you get another job paying 20% more, you won’t notice any difference from the money, but you may not like the work environment at all, possibly making you miserable for 40 hours a week.

Just another thing to consider… you are past the point where additional money makes you any happier (something like $40k/year I think), so you might as well do what you enjoy!

So many of us just drift from job to job and waste away many chances to organise better positions and opportunities for ourselves.

But running even a smaller blog like mine (and with all the commenting I do…) takes up a lot of my free time. I literally haven’t worked less than 8 hours every day for the last 3 months—whether it’s on the job or the blog. Generally it’s more like 12. BOCTAOE…like Christmas. That was only like 1 hour. :P

Of course, there’s a lot to consider. What kind of lifestyle cut would you take? Do you have enough to blog about? (looking at your archives, I’m thinking yes….) Could you go back to work?