I finished my ATPL exams just a month back but was interested to hear comments of working while studying for ATPLs. I tried this but found it incredibly hard (was working as a Project Manager). Doing a 5 day week with studying led me to the decission of dropping down to part time hours, working 3 days and studying for 2 extra days. Eventually even this wasn't enough (in my opinion) and I was lucky enough to get redundancy so could dedicate all my time to it.
Good luck though, if you can do it, it keeps the funds coming in..
As a reply to costs, I'm about 40hrs into my IR, have completed the ME and not started CPL yet. To date, this flight training has cost me about £12.5K
Mark.