There’s a second way to get money. If you learn to make a good product in unreal you become obviously valuable to companies that will pay you top wages as a professional games developer. I started coding as a teenager. I was lucky enough to live in the UK and get a free education but during university I was having difficulty making ends meet and went looking for a job. Based on the games I’d already made I found that companies were prepared to pay me! Ironically perhaps this gave me the confidence to go back to University and finish things up but when I again went looking for jobs it was the demo’s I’d created in my own time (little changed during my Uni years for that matter) that got me in the door.
Over the years (that was early 90s) I’ve interviewed hundreds of programmers and the ones with good looking demos - either demonstrating solid technical skills or the ability to write code to support imagination - always stood out.
As said above, don’t look for the money initially, look for the product and the skills, the money will come.