ickle black box:
Your right... money and flying for me are not important - I would live in a dodgy caravan and fly for food!!
Tarmach:
How to become an IT consultant... OK here goes.
Firstly - getting into the contracting market can be an arse to start off, but once you are on the ladder, things move pretty quick.
For someone with no IT experience, the best route in is to do a perm. job for about 6mths - 1 year. You can normally find trainee stuff fairly easily.
Once in the perm. job, specialise as quickly as possible in a certain area - e.g. - JAVA programming and become an expert.
Bin the job when you are confident you can walk into a random Company and say .. yep you want that... no problem! (certain amount of blagging usually required)
Note you will not normally be able to look for contract jobs while in a perm. job unless your notice period is 1 week or less. This is because most contract jobs work like this: Day 1 : Send CV, 20 mins later get call asking for interview, Day 2: Attend interview "Can you start tommorrow - 7am??"
And thats it - do a good 6 months contract work, then ask for a pay rise - if they refuse, leave.
Agencies love people with commerical experience. Also remember all agencies are Ba****ds - they only ring when they have a job they think you can do. Best approach I have found is to treat them exactly the same: Use, Use, Use!! - dog eat dog!
Great thing about contracting is when you are bored - leave! also you can plan time off for flying easily or ATPL exams, etc.
for starters try these:
www.computerpeople.co.uk
www.jobserve.com
If you need any more info, let us know!!