Age has nothing to do with it. If you have talent, then spend your time improving. Practice & become good at what you do. If you want to make money meanwhile just get a job, thats pretty much what everyone else does, (that or go to college). If you don't have at least some work to show a prospective employer, then you stand little chance of getting a job doing 3d work.

Turbosquid is as good a place as any to find out if you can make money, and there is no real risk.

if you are trying to animate money, Photoshop will know you scanning a bill and will NOT let you do it.........but........you can scan the bill in slices, like about 10.........it wont recognize that much of the image.   You can stitch it together and make it a full texture. If you are able to do this, and you try to bring up the image in an image viewer, it will most likely tell you that it can not show money, at it did this to me on my Mac. I was able to get Lightwave to recognize the image and apply it as a texture and animate. You need to just sit down and improve you skills.