This thread does make me feel slightly guilty.

I have never aspired to full-time professionalism in music but have thoroughly enjoyed semi-professional status over 40+ years, playing and singing in some wonderful places. Both Tina and I had demanding professional jobs but we still found time for weekend and the occasional midweek gigs and now that we have retired we have been able to extend what we do and practice more. We have several irons in the fire so that beside our singing and playing, we are in a highly regarded folk dance band that gets far more offers of gigs than it can handle and we act as a technical team for popular shows that have taken us to five different countries in the last three years. We manage to keep ourselves pretty busy musically without having to accept the sort of gigs mentioned above that we feel would debase our music.
The guilt comes from conversations from folk music professionals that we meet who confess to us how much they earn in a year - and we know that between us we are earning more than them.
I suppose the guilt is assuaged, somewhat, by the fact that throughout our married lives, we have run weekly folk clubs - never taking a penny out for doing so - and have this provided work for folk musicians on an estimated 1800 occasions, apart from all the tours that we have arranged for singers and musicians.