While I appreciate your input, I simply disagree in some areas. Life is short and I think that different things make people happy.
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I guess I need to just say at this point that I'm 42 years old, working a good job for the first time in my life with a multiyear contract and I plan to enjoy my life while I pay down my debt. No more CCs. We buy everything in cash or debit card. The debt is being paid down just as my student loans were paid down to this last 30K. It'll take time. In the meantime, life is too short to cut down to bare bones unless absolutely necessary, is my philosophy. My only debate was in saving for retirement versus spending all excess money on debt.
First: Big congratulations on your realization and change in attitude and on jumping in and making changes right now. That is a very significant accomplishment, especially when you come from a background where everything you've done is unheard of. You should rightfully be proud of yourself.
What I would encourage you to do now is take a hard, big-picture look at everything you will need to accomplish in the next @30 years. You make a
lot of money now, and that's awesome. But you also have a big-ass hole you need to dig yourself out of, and a lot of retirement to save for, and you want a house, and all those things are going to cost money -- and you have fewer years in which to accomplish those things than someone who was lucky enough to hop on the big money train at 21 or 25. I would suggest trying something like Cfiresim and playing around with different scenarios.
The response above struck me, because this is where I think you and your wife differ. You want to live for today (within the bounds of reason and responsibility), and she feels insecure about tomorrow. So one thing to keep in mind is that each of these decisions isn't just a tradeoff between buying X now and paying down Y in CC debt -- it's a tradeoff between buying X now and making your wife feel more secure. So you may have to make some compromises between what you want, what your wife wants, and what is most financially beneficial in order to keep things in a balance that both of you can live happily with.
I think the response above exemplifies why you have received a lot of pushback from some of the posters. From some of the early posts, it sounded like you were saying that your lifestyle was pretty much set -- that you'd be willing to tinker a little around the edges, but any significant changes weren't going to happen, and so the real choice was whether to use the money left over to pay down debt or make your wife happy. And so everyone was jumping on to try to change that mindset, so that you could see that your desire to have X now should also be in question and balanced against everything else. From your later posts, I think you've gotten that message.
But the other reason people harp on expenses is because controlling your lifestyle is far and away the most important thing you can do to improve your financial situation. Say, for example, you need $60K/yr (over SS) in retirement. That means over the next 25+ years, you'll need to save around $1.5M. OTOH, if you need only $40K/yr in retirement, that means you only need to save $1M. And that is a triple-whammy: (1) you have $500K less you need to save; (2) you have lower annual costs now, so you have more money available to do productive things with; and (3) you can use that freed-up money to pay down your CC debt and save yourself 20-25% on that six-figures you owe. So it's not really about the cable or the car or anything else in particular; it's the triple benefit each of those individual decisions provides.
I'm not going to tell you what you should do; you're a grown-ass human, and you have the right to make the decisions that work for you and your family. But I will recommend that you challenge your own thinking, because some of the stuff that we think we need, or that we think makes us happy, is both unnecessary and takes us away from things that would improve our lives immeasurably. For example: a life of watching TV until you can afford to eat out again is ultimately unsatisfying (ask me how I know! You've hit on my primary weakness there). What else could you do with that time that is free? Are there clubs you could join? Sports leagues? An evening on the patio or in front of the fire and a bottle of wine? A charity you could volunteer for? The question ultimately isn't whether you enjoy cable; it's whether there are other, cheaper things out there that might bring more value to your life and make it feel fuller, more enriching, less day-to-day drudgery. The idea is to expand your mind and draw on your creativity to envision a life that is beyond the standard consumerism that we were all brought up with.
Ok, I'll stop talking now. ;-) Good luck; as I said, you're off to a great start. Keep reading, keep tracking, keep learning, keep adjusting. You'll get there.