How to resolve "invalid number of 'breaks'"
It looks like your data isn't actually a 2-dimensional frame, just a 1-dimensional series of strings.  (Hence the error when you try to select out an income column.)  So casting to numeric doesn't make sense.

You'd want to split rather than just replacing periods, but also your data strings aren't period-separated; it's almost space-separated, but you also have data strings that have internal spaces ("Homeowner free and clear"), so you can't just split on spaces.  You'd have to be more clever in splitting up the strings into the columnar data you want.  Or, hopefully, your data is more cleanly set up elsewhere.