<prompt> Human: Hello all and thank you for reading my post. Basically what has happened is mainly my wife but me as well, have lived a life outside of our means. We have been a single income family for going on 8 years now and we used credit cards and personal loans to basically disguise that or make it to where we could live how we wanted. Now we are going through a divorce and we have agreed that I take the Credit Card debt and she gets all the school loans, roughly 22k each.The problem is that I am paying the minimums and that all adds up to around 600. After my child support, alimony, and all other bills, I basically have about 100 to my name. My car loan is only 211 monthly. I am trying to figure out ways of paying this debt off. I have thought about bankruptcy long and hard but the truth is that I am at a point in my military career to where bankruptcy can have detrimental effects on my career path.What are some of the ways other than buckling down or embracing the suck that I can use to clear this debt? Thanks for your input.Assistant: You absolutely need to make a budget. Many people think of budget as a thing you do when you try to spend as little as possible. Nothing could be further from what a true budget is.A budget is the guide you make to assign your dollars to work where you want them to. It is a document that showcases your priorities, not something that constrains you.So make a full budget. Have your total monthly income at the top. Have all of your debt listed by what it is, total amount owed, minimum payments, and interest rates for each individual debt.Then, have your expenses. Every dollar you earn should be accounted for here. The main mistake people make is only writing out regular bills, like rent and insurance. But a true budget needs to know what you spend on restaurants, clothes, entertainment, everything. Only once you know where your money is going can you start to fix things by moving money to a different category.If you dont already know where your money is going, then go through the last three months of creditdebit card statements and categorize every expenditure on it. From there you can figure out if the amount spent there is something you want to continue.And also list your assets. For things like a car, list how much it could be sold for if you sold it today.Once you have that budget, post it here. The community can help you develop a plan to pay off the debt.Human: Yea I have a pretty decent budget. The problem has been spending control.  <response>: Then you dont have a budget. You have Disney math. A real budget is control, it tells you where your dollars go. If you have a spending issue then you dont have a budget. 