(Please note, this was originally posted on another site where I'm a regular, and I was referred here, so if it looks familiar to anyone, that's why!)
I’ve been considering taking a job that would mean a pretty substantial pay cut (from around $100K/year to around $65K/year), but a dramatic increase in personal happiness (and a vastly more family-friendly schedule). I was trying to figure out (a) whether we could afford for me to do this at all; and (b) whether it made financial sense to do it, and in doing some research, I found my way to MMM.
Oh. My. G-d.
My life is apparently a financial disaster zone (student loan debt, credit card debt, car loan, mortgage), and I have no business taking a pay cut – in fact, I probably (by MMM standards) need a second and possibly third job. I just… I’m kind of speechless. I sort of vaguely knew we had some debt, and we should probably deal with it, but after reading the blog, I find I feel like I’m about to crawl out of my skin just thinking about how much we owe and how long it will take us to pay it off. I mean, if we (me and my husband, we’re married with no kids) got serious right now, we could have everything – credit cards, car, student loans, mortgage – paid off in ten years, but that’s assuming we don’t have any children and neither of us loses our job or has a decrease in income. My job’s fairly stable and I’m an attorney, so even if I lost this particular job for some reason I don’t expect my pay to go down, but Husband’s field is a good bit more volatile, so it’s not really safe to assume we’ll stay at this combined income level for a decade. And it’ll take a decade JUST TO PAY OFF OUR DEBTS, never mind save for retirement.
I can’t believe I’ve never done this math before, and that I so blindly bought into the whole “this is what people do in suburbia” myth that our families and friends have spun for us. What is wrong with me? And now that I know what an epic mess we’ve created, what the heck do I do now? Wait until I’m 41 to try to have a child once we’re debt-free? Get clear of everything but the mortgage (that’ll take three years) and hope my fertility holds out until 34? I was really hoping we would start trying for a child this year since I’m about to turn 31 (and the new job with pay-cut would’ve been very family-friendly, while my current job is not), but I am absolutely panicked over our financial situation now and don’t see how we can afford to bring a child into this financial disaster zone at all, even if I don't take the job with the pay cut. I feel like I unwittingly sacrificed my potential future child for a fancy law degree and a new car, and all I want to do is cry.
Also, I'm concerned that my husband is not going to see things the same way - he's about five years older than I am and did not got to graduate school, so he's been in the workforce A LOT longer and has so far been resistant to the idea of using "his" income to pay for "my" debt, meaning that (a) I don't know if he's going to want to help me at all with debt repayment other than the mortgage; and (b) he's not going to be willing to make any big lifestyle changes like becoming a one-car family or selling our house to move closer to (at least one of) our jobs, so more than 50% of my income is going towards "my half" of our living expenses and there's nothing I can do to change that number (except hope that maybe husband will come around and want to tackle the debt as a team).
I just don't know where to begin and would love to hear from others who started out with crazy debt and a reluctant spouse and made it through.