I want to chime in because I did EXACTLY the same thing you did. I took a $10 furniture moving/warehouse job out of college back around 2001 so that I could finance my struggling shareware game business. I worked seasonally, 7-9 hours during the summer and a few 6 hour days a week during the winter, for 3 years.
It was one of the worst decisions I ever made.
I lost the next decade of my life to profound depression after the loss of a close friend, crushing debt, no social life, just really endless problems that were exacerbated by the regressive political climate of the times. I felt a strange duty to give up my dreams and put my nose to the grindstone to make up for the cushy years of the late 90s when the future was so bright you had to wear shades. It put me so far behind that I was just coming out of my funk in 2007 and had no reserves to prepare for the housing bust even when I saw it coming a mile away. I got another dead end computer repair job for 3 more years only to see $1000 per month go toward my credit card debt (which never went down even though I haven’t used a credit card since 2008) which led to a falling out with my business partner and total implosion of my finances which I won’t go into. So in many ways my career didn’t begin until around 2011 or so when I started over.
But, in the 3 years since, I worked very hard every day to make it as a freelancer and it seems the effort is beginning to pay off. I started small on freelancer.com, getting $100 jobs that I completed every 1-3 days and began to see that it was a possible replacement for a regular job. I supplemented my income by flipping old Macs on ebay and craigslist. Then I moved up to elance and odesk and began taking jobs in the $1000-1500 range. I’ve worked with a couple of clients in the $5000 range and had a 6 month contract at my hourly contracting rate which allowed me to save enough to live up to a year afterward with no outside income. I’ve started getting so many leads filling my inbox that I can’t answer them all. The catch is that this is mostly for iOS work, which can be extremely taxing/tedious if you bump up against limitations in the APIs (which seems to happen often in the projects I take on because I like the fringe stuff). So there is definitely work available, but be prepared to put in a lot of hours both on and away from the computer.
The biggest challenges I face now are lean weeks between gigs and just general anxiety from everything resting on my shoulders. I’ve found that the right client there makes all the difference. If you remember the old adage “good, fast, cheap - pick any two” then the default mode tends to be good and cheap if you are a perfectionist. So clients that are well educated and/or patient tend to be more copacetic than clients that are merely wealthy or business-oriented. YMMV though because I tend to be a lazy programmer who likes to write the best solution once (as opposed to iterating) so I do the majority of my problem solving in the background of my subconscious. In my younger days, I was kind of the opposite, and would have made a better rockstar hacker in a startup doing good/fast work had there been more opportunities after the dot bomb.
I feel like I’ve been a bit of a broken record about this stuff but it’s because I wish there was a road map available for new developers so they could avoid the same mistakes I made. For example, always charge at least your overtime rate which in your case would be $18 per hour. So that means if you bid for a flat rate job, draw up your hours estimate, multiply it by 3, and multiply that by $18. So say you think something will take 2 weeks or 80 hours, you would bid at least $4320 for it. On paper it looks like you’re charging $54 per hour, but in reality it could be 2 months before you get another gig, allowing for downtime. After you do a couple of jobs like that and track your time, you can begin to refine your estimates and get closer to actually making $50 per hour, and then gradually raise it to $75 or $100 or whatever you feel comfortable with. That mostly depends on how much in demand you are, so in the beginning it’s more important to land a couple of gigs than charge top dollar IMHO.
As for where to get gigs, I’ve done a couple for friends in the $1000-1500 range, and if you want to do web development, just look at prominent businesses in your area that have a lousy web presence. I tried cold calling and hitting the pavement once but only had a list of 50 businesses and didn’t get any hits. You should probably aim for at least 100 businesses if you go that route since it’s maybe a 2% conversion rate. A better way is probably to start with immediate family, talk to their friends in various businesses and narrow it down to 2 or 3 and meet them casually over coffee or dinner and make your pitch like it’s old hat. Then your conversion rate might be 50% because you can get right to their sore points and once they are interested in what you can do, charge maybe 50-100% of the going rate in your area, depending on your experience level. The hardest part about that is being on call afterward as the friendly neighborhood computer guy, so have some sort of plan in place for incidents and charge accordingly, say $75 per hour with a 2 hour minimum so they only call you when they really need you.
I just want to close by saying that this is probably a means to an end. My goal now is to be part of at least a 5 member team of consultants (what contractors used to be called in the 90s) and charge hourly business rates, which probably are in the $100-250 range, even in rural America. Either that or save up enough money so that I can bootstrap my own apps. A possible route there is selling ownership in your business, say 10, 20% for X many tens of thousands of dollars but I don’t know enough about how the new micro investing laws work so I will probably have to think of something clever enough for kickstarter. I’m hesitant to go that route again though because I failed so painfully in the past and am really looking for a sustainable business model. This last part seems to be one of the great pains of our time, so I’m optimistic that somebody might provide a turnkey solution, but I’ve been waiting 15 years for it. Grouptalent, gun.io, freelanceinbox and others of that sort seem promising so you might have luck there. If you want to get started right away, I recommend odesk and have heard good things about guru as well. You can definitely do it, so don’t settle for labor because most of the safety nets have unravelled and they prey on people with no leverage. You know how they say not to be the smartest person in the room, or the best player in the band? Well don’t be the only guy in the warehouse without an addiction, criminal record or kids on child support. The ridicule I endured at that job was at least as damaging to my psyche as the low pay and backbreaking workload. Get out as soon as you can.