No sob story, just getting straight to the meat of the problem:
I'm 44, wife is 40. Living in Kentucky. I'm a middle school teacher, she's a pharmacist. My student loan debt is $56k, hers is $178k. We both had other careers (and around $10k in student loan debt apiece before going to school for our current careers). When we were in school we were pretty much on our own - no family helping out, so we used max student loans to basically live off of, with the (idiotic) thought that once we were out of school and working, we would be able to pay the loans off no problemo.
We are idiots.
Our adjusted gross income joint filing for 2016 was 169k and change. The student loans we currently have run us $1750 per month and we are going to be paying on them for the next 30 years. We have 4 kids, and we have 2 vehicles (both paid off). Mortgage is $750 per month (no, we can't downsize our house... with 4 kids and 2 dogs, there is no way we can get any more cramped).
Only debt we have outside of mortgage and student loans is about $3k in credit card debt. I know we shouldn't have it, but we do.
My wife's car is 15 years old. If it breaks down tomorrow, we are fucked. If one of my kids need medical care that's not covered my my insurance, we are fucked. We had $6k saved up for an 'emergency fund' and my daughter had to have a hearing aid. Insurance doesn't cover that and it cost just over $4k. Our water heater committed suicide and there went the rest of our savings.
We are lost. I'm lost. We haven't taken anything like a vacation in 4 years. We very rarely eat out, I've got underwear that is older than my youngest kid. I don't know what to do. Short of some windfall that would wipe out my wife's student loans, I can't see anything changing in the foreseeable future (or at least not for the better).
So... help? Please? What do I do? What can I do?
Submitted April 01, 2017 at 10:00PM by throwawaymk1973 http://ift.tt/2nv6F65
