<prompt> Human: No sob story, just getting straight to the meat of the problem:Im 44, wife is 40. Living in Kentucky. Im a middle school teacher, shes 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 were wrong.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 cant 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 shouldnt have it, but we do.My wifes car is 15 years old. If it breaks down tomorrow, we are fucked. If one of my kids need medical care thats 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 doesnt cover that and it cost just over 4k. Our water heater committed suicide and there went the rest of our savings.We are lost. Im lost. We havent taken anything like a vacation in 4 years. We very rarely eat out, Ive got underwear that is older than my youngest kid. I dont know what to do. Short of some windfall that would wipe out my wifes student loans, I cant 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?edited for wordingAssistant: That is insane amount of allowance to give your kids, unless they are responsible for buying their own clothes or something. Cut it in half.Id stop paying into your retirement for a few months and put that money towards the credit card debt. And when your youngest is in school, the money going towards daycare needs to ALL go towards debt. Human: its only 40 per month, per kid youngests goes into his savings but totally agree with everything else. thanks!  <response>: Youre paying credit card interest right now at a rate of 20-30 probably. Do NOT put money in a preschoolers savingscollege accounts when you have that kind of debt costing you that much interest! 