You are supposed to have some money reserves to keep you afloat for at least 6 moths. And you shouldn't expect your consulting to thrive until at least a year later.

It takes time to build client base and it takes time to build your personal brand. If you expected it all to magically just work you are just plain stupid^H^H^H^H^HH^H^naive.

In my case it was somewhat faster as we switched from a full-time job to working for the same company as contractors, but after a year, that first client was a tiny blip on our radar.

Work on promotion, hit all the meetups and conferences, meet people, release some cool open source, write a blog. THEN you will start getting clients.