$50K is certainly doable. I’m no longer doing freelance work, but when I was, I consistently grossed twice that much per year or more for many years.
Most of the time I was charging between $60 and $75 per hour working as a programmer. I also did consulting work, where I got as much as $120 per hour — and that was twenty years ago (Y2K crisis).
One key is to develop a specialty. In my case, it was embedded systems. Overall I completed over two-dozen projects that went to market working as a freelancer. I started long before the Internet was available — so many of my earlier jobs were word of mouth and referrals.
I created a website back in the mid-1990’s, and started to get work through that. Later I established listings on sites like Freelancer.com and Upwork.com and got jobs there too — although after working a couple of projects for a client through one of those sites (enough to get some reputation) I would usually work directly with the client from then on.
The other key is repeat business. I tried to have long-term relationships with my clients; typically five or six years, working on multiple projects. At the same time, I would try to have at least one side project going on to fill in any slow spots.
Sometimes the side projects had a life of their own. During one slow period after the dot-com bust (2003), I switched to doing website programming in PHP for a while. One of those part-time “side” jobs lasted almost 10 years, covering 1200 websites. So you have to learn to be flexible too. Along the way I used 20 different programming languages (35 if you count each assembly language separately).