<prompt> Human: Trying to turn over a new leaf on finances. Having worked on this for a few months mostly just reducing expenses, building an emergency fund, and moving high-interest credit card debt onto low-interest balance transfer offers, here is the current state of things:- 67k of credit card debt, which is nominally at 0 until at the soonest Jan 2018, but I think of as being at 3 since that was what the balance transfer fees upfront for it were. We are paying only the minimums on this as we try to bring up our emergency fund and figure out what to do.- 70k of Parent PLUS student loans at an average interest rate of 7.2, of which only about half are currently in repayment and the other half will go into repayment in Dec 2017 D-day.- 5.5k car loan at 1.99- 52k mortgage left at 7.25 on a home worth 100k-200k, but probably more like 100k- 24k 401k loan at 5.25, which I think pays the interest to ourselves, so I dont know whether this is considered debt except that it reduces our take-home pay when the payments are deducted. There is currently 330k in the 401k.We are 60 years old and in not great health, but also not actively sick. We have an income of 100kyear pre-tax. Even so, were having a hard time covering expenses payments on all this debt out of our income. The other half of the student loans kicking in could make that impossible.We currently have a little more than a month of bufferemergency fund. When we started getting serious about this two months ago, we had no buffer at all and were living paycheck to paycheck.Here is our current plan for what to do next:1. Try to refinance our mortgage, hopefully with a cash-out refinancing that will allow us to pay off some of our credit card debt. - Our land is worth 100k, and our town assesses our home to be worth 100k as well for property tax purposes, for a total of a theoretical 200k. However, the home is in bad repair we never felt we had enough money to repair it and may be worth nothing, we dont know. We hope we would still be able to refinance based on the land value alone, but it seems difficult. 2. Refinance student loans to lower interest. - Havent even started to think about this yet.3. If there is still high-interest debt after doing these refinancings, maybe look into getting a personal loan if it would be better interest than credit cards?Obviously increasing income and decreasing expenses would also help, and were trying to do that, but its slow going and no magic bullet so far.Do you all have any suggestions? Are we totally thinking about this wrong? We have been mostly focused on trying to eliminate the credit card debt through refinancing since the prospect that if could shoot back up to 20-30 if we run out of balance transfer offers is terrifying. Is there something else we should be doing?Assistant: Why not post your budget andor spending?Human: I was worried about preserving anonymity and trying to only give enough detail to ask a meaningful question. But heres a breakdown of a recent month:- 5K income- 1400 mortgage- 900 credit card minimum payments- 200 life insurance- 250 cell phone bill- 400 student loan payments- 120 car insurance- 275 electric- 120 landline and internet- 840 food and gas- 135 other utilities- 300 car loan- 90 other we are trying to cancel thisOne of our children is still living at home, so these are for three people.The credit card minimum payments may go down soon as things shift to being at 0 on balance transfers.Assistant: Phone you could easily knock 100 off. You can get phone plans for like 35-50 a line. Look into Verizon Prepaid, or Straight Talk or any other company that offers prepaid. I use Straight Talk and I pay flat 50 for unlimited talktext and 5gb of 4g data.Your food bill unless gas takes up a huge portion of that... is ridiculous for only 3 people. That could be cut down some.Is your child old enough to work and pay his portion of these bills? Or is their income already included in your numbers?Human: Some of the phone bill is payment plans on phones which we havent paid off yet, so switching might be difficult. :  <response>: The bottom line is that your phone bill is ridiculously high. Do whatever you can to lower your services as much as possible. 