Hey, I'm a mid-thirties guy with a wife and two kids. I have multiple autoimmune diseases that make it pretty rough for me to get by sometimes. I had a crash so bad when COVID hit that I lost months of work - right after we had burned through our Emergency fund and savings for several minor disasters, including losing my job because Corona trashed our company. I got our house payments stopped till June of 2022. I lost my insurance from losing my first job.

I ended up getting another job though, but making less. I make $27 an hour in Central Florida. The housing market has exploded so houses are astronomically through the roof. I've though about selling this one and downgrading, but even the downgrades here are getting $100k over market. It's insanity. I'd go from a $320k house that's worth $450k right now (Zillow says $410k), to a $200k house that's probably only with $100k. I don't know what side of that particular bubble I'll end up on, because I think it's going to crash eventually.

I am a machinist. I'd say I'm a 8/10 skill level wise, and I typically end up as one of the top guys in the shop - if not the top. I have a lot of really specialized skills and I'm a quick learner. I currently am heavily relied on in my shop - after another machinist leaves in a few months, I'll be the only one who can produce massive amounts of their business. I make $27 / hour with occasional bonuses ($100-$1000 range). My wife works part time while building up her own business (we owned a very successful photography / videography studio in Illinois).

I'm currently enrolled in school for mechanical engineering, but it's going to be very expensive and hard to go back to school and earn a second degree (first is in Psych). There are a ton of scholarships I qualify for though.

I need to either bring down expenses or drastically increase my pay. We are already running pretty lean, but the drop in income has hurt. New insurance is much more expensive. I haven't had my meds in a couple months between catching Corona myself and insurance issues. They are $12k a month. I *think* we will make it through and be able to afford our house payments after getting some of our debt we've accrued going through life issues, but damn is it rough.

I really, truly, love my job. I want to get an engineering degree to get more income and be deeper into manufacturing. I'd love to be in a shop on the bleeding edge of something where I'd have to be deeply involved in something on the engineering side, but still get my hands dirty. I've already got some of the "practical" engineering skills like Solidworks, Autocad, and I know a fair bit of the day-to-day from working really closely with engineers in other machining jobs.

Here's the rub though. I used to be a full-stack web developer at a college. I know quite a bit of the IT side, I'm fairly skilled in SQL, C#, ASP, HTML, CSS. I've built fairly complex web apps and I've done a fair amount of C# app programming, mostly winforms. I've dabbled in python. I know a bit of statistics from college the first time and I'm interested in data science, but I haven't had a real 'data science' job. I didn't enjoy some of the things about the work-life balance, and I ended up quitting to freelance and then got into machining. I'd say I was a pretty average programmer, with the exception of I was pretty damn good with maintaining a very large website and developing pretty involved versions of CRUDs - Like a form that would take demographics data from the student admissions system (I also did that one) and would generate follow up questions based on the results and match them with scholarships.

I'm not sure I want to get back into the web side or programming in general. I haven't had much programming experience outside academia, but I'm guessing the salary is much larger. I'd probably still want to eventually end up in engineering if the stars and planets align.

Would you stay in a job you love with so much financial burden or try to break back into an industry that you've already left? Is trying for a second bachelors a good idea? Should I sell my house and find cheaper living? Anyone hiring in Central Florida or remote a programmer that needs to have a deep machining or manufacturing background?

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Random aside - if my life sounds like a shit show: In the last three years my whole family has had corona, I've had it twice. One of my best friends, my grandma and one of my mentors died. I moved 1000 miles from home. I've had a multi-month Lupus flare, which I am still in. I've been accepted to three colleges and am taking classes at all three, just because that's the way the prerequisites for Mechanical Engineering worked out around my full-time job. I had two of my dogs die within 24 hours of each other. My roof collapsed at my old house. My septic system backed up into my house - twice - at the new one and had to be completely replaced. My wife had a major bipolar episode that resulted in being hospitalized and almost wrecked our marriage. I lost a cushy machining job because of covid. I got a new job the same day I got fired making 80k/year running their night shift, but then lost it because I couldn't physically go to work due to illness. I've been in the hospital twice with kidney stones in the last year. I spent three days admitted for a panic attack that was so bad that my blood pressure skyrocketed so high that it was unreadable on our cuffs, and they had difficulty with it in the ambulance. I started a ridiculous number of drugs trying to get the Lupus livable enough to support my family, two of which I had major reactions too. I've developed extreme depression and anxiety that comes along with my Lupus flares. I'm anemic and am having difficulty absorbing nutrients so I'm tired as hell. I've went from having an emergency fund and money in the bank to getting my power shut off-thrice.

It is what it is.

I'm sure I just gave out way too much personal information for the internet.