I am in the same boat as you guys and left fulltime work a few years ago to do my PPL in the US followed by hour building and now have my last couple of ATPL's to go. I found contracting was the best way to go for me. I got an instant pay rise as I was usually on an hourly rate so it was a nice feeling to get paid for all of those overtime hours. I was based in London so there was never a shortage of work, particularly if you had big firm experience on your cv. The best thing about contracting for me was that the work tended to be for fixed periods of say 6 months and you could dig in for that time and save hard and then do a bit more flying.