<prompt> Human: 38 years old, wife also 38. 3 kids 13, 10, 6 weeks.We both work. I make 80k and she makes 65k a year. No 401k for me wife has about 70k in retirement and is due a pension as early as 51 years old romantic the state. Have generally 2k cash on hand at all time in checking account.We have a bunch of overhead monthly.1700mo mortgage - 175k note on 250k house at 3.75475mo car - 30k note on 2016 Subaru at 4.9 I have decent car we own outright 225mo - car insurance650mo - student loan 160k note at 2.9 Im a lawyer shes a counselor school is expensive350mo - private student loan 15k note at 0100mo - credit card 2k balance at 22125mo - credit card 4k balance at 1850mo - retail credit 2.5k balance 0 for another 12mo.We then live a kind of expensive life we have direct TV, netflix,sling, Spotify, cellphones, life insurance, Sirius radio, Internet, groceries, gas, eating out, school related activities, extra curricular activities, etc.How do we save for college, retirement and life events. Ive tried to budget but Im not good at it. Neither of us come from money so I feel like we are behind in money management techniques.  <response>: tldr: its _extremely_ hard to save with so much debt.income: 145kyr, 105k after taxes rough8,750 month after tax-3675 bills outlined above___5,075other advice has been to cancel the services, but even if you cancelled _all_ of them they arent going to make a large dent in your budget although you should still cancel nearly all of them, choose one or two that you cant live without and cancel the rest.The expensive lifestyle is what is killing you, not necessarily all the bills. The first thing you have to do is commit to change, you are going to have to learn how to budget first and foremost. If you have a preference on budgeting software, thats great. If not, i recommend Mint, it is what i use and its awesome. You can connect your financial accounts and it will automatically import and classify your transactions, so you can know pretty well really easily where your money is going.How to fix it, just follow the baby steps:0. create a written budget and follow it!1. 1000 emergency fund in savings2. pay off all debt using debt snowball3. 3-6 months expenses in savings as emergency fund4. start investing 15 of income for retirement5. start saving for kids collegeyou have the headroom to be contributing 2k-3k a month towards your debts. You will continue to pay minimum payments towards everything, and every other penny you can manage goes towards your debts, in order of lowest balance to largest excluding your mortgage. so, you have:2k credit card2.5k credit card4k credit card15k student loan30k car note160k student loanWhat you do is you take all that extra money, and apply it to the baby steps, and as soon as you have one debt paid off, you apply the same amount of money plus the minimum payment that you no longer have to pay for the paid-off loan to the next smallest balance. In 3-4 months you can have all your credit cards paid off, another few months that 15k student loan, and then the ball is rolling. It is hard! but its so worth it. Your kids may miss out on some fun for the next couple years, but imagine how free you will be to have even more fun with them after you dont have debts hanging over your head every day. Also, in case youve never heard of him, basically everything i said is based on Dave Ramseys approach, im not affiliated with him in any way, but his methods are helpful, check out his book Total Money Makeover 