Should I pass or take this opportunity?

So I have spent months trying to find a shop or artist to accept me as an apprentice. In fact, most places won’t even answer my emails or give me direct answers when I call and ask.

I finally found a shop to hopefully take me in. They like my portfolio and told me they can take me in a couple months to start the apprenticeship. Until then they want me to come by often and hang out to get to know people and get used to hanging out in the shop.

The terms of my apprenticeship will involve being there full time for 4 days a week (or whenever my mentor is there) and doing a lot of the dirty work in the shop such as cleaning, setting up for people, scheduling, answering the phones, running the front desk etc.

Once I start tattooing actual clients I will be on a 60/40 ratio for pay that will eventually change to 50/50 and so on. They also want me to pay 10k for the apprenticeship. This doesn’t have to be paid all at once and I’m able to set up a payment plan however I want with it. However they mentioned something about how it has to be paid fully before I can be a licensed artist.

The biggest downside of this whole endeavor is that I have to find a way to still pay my bills with little to no pay for months and very little time to actually work at my day job. The requirements in my state are 1,500 hours you have to work during your apprenticeship, and while that works out to be about 9 months if I did 40 hours a week, I’m just having trouble seeing how I’ll get thru this without going bankrupt.

I know apprenticeships are rough and I’m expecting that but I was hoping for a tiny bit of leeway so I could actually pay my bills while I make the transfer to this career. What should I do? Should I take this opportunity or risk passing it up for something slightly better. I’ve worked so hard to get someone to even look at my portfolio and I don’t wanna lose out.