Preparing for a career switch, help me on my 1 year plan

I'm trying to make a 1 year plan for a career switch to IT. Currently in the mortgage industry - My current job is comfortable but definitely has a pretty low ceiling, so I wanted to move something with a bit more upward mobility, and I've always enjoyed tech in general, so it seemed like a good fit.

My goal would be to get into cybersecurity. From poking around I've found this is more of a midcareer move, and you need to start with a feeder job, get experience and eventually work your way there. Based on what i've seen so far it seems like the a pretty typical path would be Helpdesk -> ??? -> SOC analyst -> Cybersecurity analyst -> ???.

I fully expect I will have to take a pay cut to move to a helpdesk role to get moving in the right direction, so I'm planning to take the next year to prepare a decent safety net in our savings to absorb the hit of losing that income as well as to get the skills i need for the switch. I dont make great money \~50k in a low/mcol area, but it seems like getting started at helpdesk you're likely looking at 35-40k to start. I'm sure 10-15k might not be a lot to some of you, but for our family that's a big hit. Quite a few people have said you can quickly springboard up to the 50k-60k range, but you'll likely be in that starting role for 6m-2 years. My goals therefore are to prepare as best I can to start off on a good foot and quickly move to that next stage to avoid my family having to make too many sacrifices for my career switch. .

It seems like getting your a+, net+, sec+ is a good baseline to get your foot in the door. What other learning resources would you recommend during this year to focus on to prepare for the big life switch? Is there any part time work I can/should be looking into to get a little bit of experience on the weekends/evenings?

Thanks for your time!