I read your case study last night and I was thinking about it on the drive home today. It seems you want to live conventionally but yet you have a debt to income ratio that will only ever get chipped away slowly (if at all) unless you make some radical changes. You've got to live a little crazy, baby steps will still have you climbing the mountain past normal retirement age... we want to be on top of the mountain well before we're dead.
My life example: 19 years old, exactly $41 to my name, I take a job $0.25 more than the minimum wage to work on an organic farm. No car. No phone. I live for $120 a month in a not actually refurbished chicken coop with 3 other farmhands. I walk 3/4 of a mile when I want to use the payphone. I walk a mile to the bus stop to get non-farmed groceries, which I do about twice a month, breezing through the store until I make a $40 or less purchase, with zero feelings of lust over things I can't afford... I don't even want them. I couldn't think how to spend more money at the store if I tried. I wash my clothes by hand in a bucket. Less than a year later I've got several thousand dollars, which I used to go to Europe for 3 months. I could out-MMM Mr. Money Mustache himself. Fastforward 15 years and suddenly I spent $1200 for a family of 3 on food in just one month? What ?!! It's time to channel my inner farmhand saving for Europe, so I do. Drastically.
Now, maybe you don't have that to channel. You don't know how to do it, and my example isn't relevant to you. You're not a farmhand. Payphones don't exist anymore. Whatever. That's all 100% completely true. But, what is also Completely 100% true is that there's a conventional recipe that you're buying: two cars, insular household, phone, entertainment, etc. it's an easy recipe that's out there for anyone to try (with the help of credit cards). But to erase debt making what you're making in America, you need a different recipe. You'll likely need to take advantage of situation-specific things that we don't even know about, but really are there. And to do it, you're going to have to deliberately and continually step outside of your comfort zone if you want your comfort zone to change.
So, here's what I would focus on right now:
1. Get your wife on board. Get her watching those financial shows and critiquing other people's lives. She will jump the bridge to her own situation, too. Keep asking for that as suggested in other posts in this forum.
2. Step outside of your comfort zone, often. If you're not seriously exercising now, join one of those crossfit type classes where they force you to work out. (Often they have a free trial period, I'm not saying you have to pay for this all year-- the key is just go into a strange place to do something strange to you, that's also in itself conducive to change.) From there, branch out, continuously pushing those boundaries. Then apply that mentality to your finances.