I compete with people who are willing to work for $1/hr, on freelance sites like oDesk - occasionally someone picks me so I earn few bucks to get by. If I try to charge more people usually accept workers who charge the same amount as me but are from more western countries.

Ideally I'd settle for some junior dev type of position with reasonable(read: low/acceptable) salary, but without college degree and living in Europe, but not EU (thus no work permits for those), there's small chance of that happening - I've tried and eventually gave up on that...

Oh and today I got sued by govt for failing to send in (literally) an empty paper for my previous company and I'll (most likely) have to pay an equivalent of one month american-level-salary fine. So I've got that going on in my life too, which isn't really the best situation you want to be in if you earn your money like I do...

I don't even know why I'm writing this, I don't have any tips or suggestions for you, and even if I had you can see from the above that I'm probably not the best person to give out advice. And I understand what you're saying but... things could be worse.

You at least have options: build dreams for yourself, or for others. There's nothing stopping you (as far as I can tell) from working on both your projects and/or for someone else.