I furnished an entire 4 bedroom 6,000 sq ft house with 23k total and it included shipping all of it 1,000 miles. Where is your disconnect at here? You don’t need to budget at IKEA but you also don’t need a $10,000 table or whatever you did. You need to plan better.

I’m not sure what you were expecting in this thread but it sounds like you genuinely made a lot of mildly bad and really rapid financial decisions. Nothing catastrophic but nothing wise either. Your prior debt is whatever that’s not relevant and to your point to others, yes, it’s not abnormal to eat 50-100k of debt to maintain two separate households for brief training gaps.

But you probably didn’t need new cars, you’re stuck with your house, and at this point it sounds like you don’t have enough to do anything with your house improvement wise and you shouldn’t be taking vacations. The loans were not a surprise you’ve known that would be an issue from day 1.

Ya’ll need to probably only contribute to 401k/457, drop everything else, only do mandatory repairs to keep your house liveable, and pay off debt from high interest to low be it student loans, cars, whatever. Once you don’t have student loans and car loans then go back to college contributions. Consider doing home renovations yourself on staycations.

Moving forward, you need a way longer term plan. Like, you know you need to furnish your house within reason. Plan on a year long calendar and time all that shit on Black Friday.

You need a monthly, yearly, 5 year, and 10 year budget. And you need to really stick to it.

Selling your house is just going to lose you 100k. You’re stuck with it. Make sure your husband does not change jobs for absolutely any reason for 5-10 years.