1) Personally, if I was in your position, I'd keep my job as a financial adviser. You can do your job and make lots of money and just play games in your free time. Making games is entirely different from playing them and not nearly as financially rewarding.
Well, to be honest, that is easy to say for someone not working in his job. Fact is, most jobs are BORING AS HELL! If you add the fact that you might not like the job you are doing (like the OP writes in his opening post), or come to dislike the job you are doing (takes some years sometimes, even switching companies multiple times, to REALLY find out out how utterly you hate your job. Doesn't help that most colleges and unis might give you good theoretical groundwork for your future career, but do very little to really prepare you for what you will do most of the time on the job: administrative tasks, company politics, fighting your boss or that obnoxious co worker, and so on).
Now, it might be that the OP does not understand that most game dev jobs most of the time are also BORING AS HELL! But it might be a good idea to have a look at it, just for the slim fact that he loves the topic and what he has to do enough to balance out administrative tasks, company politics, fighting co-workers ans so on. That is worth more than all the money you can make in a job.
I can really relate to that, and I think the OP is quite brave AND clever to think about switching jobs. Most people don't do that, arrange themselves with the job they hate, and grow up to be a very bitter person by the time they are nearing their retirement.
Now, personally before applying for any college fulltime I would try to dip my toes a little bit. See what game dev could be like, see what line of work in the game dev business is mostly my cup of tea. Try your hand at some programming, download an engine and tinker a little bit with the level editor, maybe have a look at 3D Modelling and animation.... whatever COULD be your cup of tea.
That might take a while, and might not seem to be very productive at the beginning, but if you manage to write your own version of pong and utterly love programing by that time, your confidence in switching industries and applying for college will be much higher. Conversly, if you completly disliked the expierience, chances are you will also not like game programing as part of larger, maybe even AAA level projects. You just saved some serious cash and wasting half a year while struggling to keep up with your college course.
A little bit OT, but to give another example why you should value liking a job over getting lots of money for it:
In military, I had a subordinate that told me an interesting story one day... we have yearly refresher courses in military, so you tend to see each other roughly once a year. The question what people did in the last year is then a quite frequent subject.
One year that guy told me that he had switched jobs, getting into a support role in a very big commodity trader (I guess it was Glencore as they are the biggest one located where he lived, but he never told)... extremly well paid job, he claimed to have made double as much as in his former job. He kind of knew that the atmosphere in the company might not have been the best, because his plan was to stay with the company for a year, save the money and then go travelling for a year thanks to all the money saved.
Well, in the end he gave up after 3 months according to his own words. The Traders seemed to be pretty much a**holes, coming to his backoffice desk just to vent steam even if it wasn't his fault at all (most probably totally drugged up like the Brokers in the stock markets). He tried to get help from his boss but the comment of the boss simply was: "The traders have to vent their steam somewhere, Just take it as part of your job."... yeah, right.
Money is not everything if you have to endure shit like this to earn it.
