IF you manage to get a job, the starting salary for most newbie pilots I know (myself included) is £20-25000 If you have paid for your type rating, it might be towards the top end. If you are bonded for your type rating, it's towards the bottom end. I took a pay cut of nearly £10000 to do the job I'm in now.
I expect to be in this kind of pay bracket for several years until I have gained enough experience to be able to move to a larger operator where the progression to higher pay scales is possible.
That's the realistic picture, particularly since you seem to be heading for the modular route rather than the integrated route. There are those who do get straight into an airliner job, and over the course of a few years their financial position does eventually get somewhere decent.
Commuting - it's a 2.5 to 3 hour commute from my home to where I work. I work some pretty strange hours, but nowhere near as bad as some. That said, the worst of the "flying to fly" commuting seems to happen in the USA and not so much in Europe. Bear in mind you have to go where the jobs are. Would you move to Inverness, or Newquay, or Norwich, or London, to follow a 6 month contract? If you have a house established and a mortgage, this makes it a lot more complicated since paying mortgage on your own house and then rent on a hardly used room near to your current place of work makes life very financially stretched. If you're a 20 year old living at mum and dad's hotel, your options are clearly much greater for renting something near to where you're working.