The other side of the fence!
Atomic Rooster, I hope that the foregoing views have been helpful but I feel that having been on both sides of the fence the flying is a no brainer!
I too worked in IT - for about ten years in fact - I enjoyed a salary of around £50 000 plus great benefits but I knew from a young age that I really wanted to fly. As a result I was completely depressed by my humdrum IT career and every Sunday night felt miserable about Monday morning. Of course for ten years I enjoyed the money and lifestyle, ran a TVR, took superb holidays (wife earned slightly smaller salary also in IT so household income pretty good) but in the end I realised that there's more to life than money and security.
I trained as a pilot, spent 18 months looking for a flying job while back in IT contracting on a day rate of £450 a day i.e. about £110 000 pa. This also coincided with us starting a family. Eventually I was offered a job flying turboprops for a leading regional airline - £24000 basic salary and I'm based 400 miles from home at the moment. Completely love the flying, the job has lived up to my expectations completely though the money and domestic life is !!!!. I miss my wife and little girl terribly.
Would I do it again? - you bet, I get up every morning for work and love it - but of course I am fairly new to it. I get plenty of hands on experience, the Captains are at this base at least are fantastic and there's no way I would even consider going back to my old job. Worth remembering too that in perhaps 2 years I will be eligible for command when the salary will be about on a par with the IT salary I earned after more than ten years as a permie in IT. Of course I have added £60k or so to the mortgage but that's only about £400 a month on a mortgage and when you think about it that's not exactly earth shattering once you're on a £50k ish salary (it's pretty bad at the moment though!)
I'd say a deciding factor for me was if I could return to the old job level fairly easily if it didn't all work out. It's a decision only you and your wife can make but I knew I loved flying better than anything else. There's a great line in one of the Star Trek movies where Spock says to Kirk 'Flying a starship is your first best destiny, anything else is a waste of material' - that's how I felt about flying airliners and I still do.
Is it your first best destiny?
Desk-pilot
PS Read 'What Should I do with My Life' by Po Bronson - one of the best books I have ever read and found it helpful.