TL;DR, my question is: is my proposed plan to start with 25NLHE or 50NLHE, grinding up to potentially 100NLHE, playing only on weekends on NJ online sites viable to earn me the relatively modest amount of $15/hour on average?

Full Story:

I was a part-time professional poker player, both online and live, from 2002 through mid-2009. I never was able to beat higher stakes games, but I was regularly crushing live games of $1/$2 and $2/$5 NL HE (usually, with playing relatively deep at 300BB buy-in games). I was also consistently beating 100NLHE on most online sites. My usual win rate over that period was $60/hour live and 25BB/100 hands online.

As Black Friday approached and it was becoming more difficult to cash out (mixed with a change in my day job to a job requiring much fuller attention), I stopped playing poker almost entirely except for occasionally 4-5 hour casino stops during business trips, where I've done well but obviously not enough data is there to tell me anything. I've kept up with the state of the poker community by listening to podcasts regularly and occasionally lurking on twoplustwo.

I have a bit of a financial crunch (I work in the non-profit charity sector where the pay isn't great), and I love my job, but I'm considering returning to poker on the weekends to earn extra income. I'd love input and suggestions on whether my plan is viable. I'd be completely happy earning about $15/hour with a stddev 5-10 buy-ins, so I feel my desired results are somewhat within reason, but I seek input nonetheless.

My primary plan, since I live in NYC, is to "commute" on the weekends to coffee shops in NJ to play online poker on NJ sites. I was thinking of starting with PartyPoker, and slowly chasing deposit bonuses at various sites as time progresses. (I expect deposit bonuses to factor in heavily to my plan.) I'd play 8-16 hours each weekend, mostly during the day hours on Saturday and Sunday. I have a friend willing to stake me a $1k bankroll, and I'd start at either 25NL or 50NL (depending on the difficulty level) and grind up until I can exit my staking arrangement and play 100NL regularly. I'd hope to start earning about 5-10 BB per 100 hands immediately and slowly work my way back to my old 25 BB per 100 at 50NL and 100NL.

Is this plan viable? And, are the NJ online games good enough and prevalent enough for this strategy to work (and should I be asking for input on that over on the Internet Poker forum?)?

My primary risk factor is that due to the demands of my day job, the amount of study time I can spend is quite limited. I probably have time to read a few newer books while commuting (any recommendations of which ones I should read?), but doing online videos and such may be too time consuming -- unless I could easily find a group of videos specifically targeted to my specific area and "missing knowledge" for my lack of experience at low-limit games from 2009-2014.

As an alternative strategy, I could focus on live games -- for which I always had better results in anyway -- but this would require long commutes on the bus to Foxwoods or Atlantic City (I won't play in the NYC underground games anymore because they are just too dangerous) -- which would eat away at my effective hourly rate given the commute time.

I realize this is a long post, but I thought perhaps it's an interesting situation for low-stakes experts to think about, and perhaps this thread could become useful for others in my situation who are coming "back" to poker and want to beat the low stakes games.