Choped your post up a bit, but I agree completely.
I'm about a year away from graduating from University, and I currently work at a job that will provide me with a great deal of flexibility in terms of hours of work. For example, due to my timezone I could work full-time and only miss the last two hours of the trading day, or possibly work half-time instead and have the trading day fully covered.
Anyways, my short term goal is of course to come up with the money for my last year of tutition, but beyond that I very, very seriously want to give trading a shot. In order to have any possibility of doing so I am going to eliminate as much debt as possible (fortunately I owe very little in the way of student loans), avoid buying a nice new car right away when I'm done school, and generally speaking do my best to put myself in a position where I can afford to survive on very little income.
Longer term, I agree that it makes sense to build up separate retirement accounts with investments in low-risk stocks, guaranteed investments, etc.
I plan on approaching this as a business (I'm a business undergrad, finance major), and I'm going to knock off nearly every single Finance class the university has to offer instead of "slacking". This fall I'm doing a couple of particularly nasty classes, one on bond valuations (shouldn't be too bad) and the other on risk management (gets into valuation of options, swaps, futures, etc.).
The most difficult aspect of being an entrepreneur is the likelihood of having very little income at the beginning of running your own business, you need to plan in advance for this in order to have a remote possibility of surviving, else you just end up back in a 9 to 5 job to support yourself...