Ignorant/not well versed on finances, married couple. Looking for answers and direction on how to plan future.

I everyone, I'm going to give our personal details and I'd love for some of you who are more educated in finances to chime in because we're lost. I feel like we have the ingredients needed to create a promising future but we just don't know how to put the recipe together.

​

Husband: 32, current monthly salary of about 6-7k based on 4 week months with an upcoming promotion in the next month, with stocks of 30k coming this winter. Unlimited overtime available if desired. About 8k in 401k. Credit card debt of about 12k.

​

Wife: 36, unemployed since 2023, taking on the trad wife life. Credit card debt of about 14k. 401k of about 19k.

​

Together: Car loan with about 15k left & RV loan of about 25k left. Credit cards are in own names but debt is spread out over home improvements and car/truck (we have 3 vehicles) things like tires, repairs, etc and some vet bills from surgeries.

​

Husband bought a house in 2021, we married in 2023. House was a real fixer upper, bought for about 180k, we received a rough estimate of current value near 300k. Husband and wife both invested into repairs with cash and labor. Entire house was remodeled... in-ground salt water pool (Florida), all new flooring, paint, landscaping, toilets, electrical, heating/air, countertops, cabinets.. the list goes on.

​

No children now or planned at all.

​

I'm looking for advice on what to do currently and what to do to set us up for the future.. As for currently, we want to find a way to get out of debt because the credit card apr's are killing us and making it to where a decent earning is seeming like pennies. The husband believes we should pull my 401k out and use it to pay down his debt and then he gets a HELOC at a good APR and then we use the HELOC to pay off my credit card debt and the vehicles. I'm against this because of the penalties we would take pulling out the 401K early plus, my contributions to the 401K while working was just about $3,000 while the rest of that over the past couple of years has all been growth. I know it's not a lot of growth but if we leave it alone it has a potential to be a nice little savings in time. I am not on the deed to the house, it is solely in his name and I recently requested for him to put me on the deed. He is hesitant to, simply because a lot of people that we know right now are going through divorces and there's just a lot of buzz in his ear about what women could do which I understand but we've been together through thick and thin, when I've had money and he hasn't, when he has an I haven't, we've been very stable and we've been together for 11 years total. I believe he should put me on the deed regardless of how we go about dealing with the debt because aside from working together as a married couple, if anything were to happen to him it would make it easier for me to have a place to live and be able to take over the house. The house has a low APR of 2.9%, other than the credit card debt, both of us have decent credit reports, no negative marks ever, no late payments ever, nothing's in collections and we don't check availability on loans unless there's an actual reason why we would need one. Both of our credit reports remains frozen.

​

Currently I manage our finances.. he goes to work and the paychecks come in to the joint account and I send the money out where bills are due and go do everything for the household such as grocery shopping, personal item shopping like shampoos, soaps, deodorants, etc, I handle our schedules in the sense of making all of our appointments.. he is going through Invisalign so I make sure that those monthly payments are paid directly to the orthodontist and I keep his appointments on the schedule to work with his work schedule. We have two dogs, a Golden Retriever and a Labrador Shar Pei mix, the lab mix goes for acupuncture / cold laser therapy every 6 weeks as a form of his rehab after having his knee replaced. I take the dogs to their appointments and do the hands on therapy at home for the lab as well.

​

We're at a loss on what to do to get out of debt but we feel like we have to do something and there has to be a smarter way other than just snowballing or Avalanche and things like that. We are not willing to consider debt consolidation if it involves not paying a monthly bill so that way the credit card companies can see that there's hard times and things like that that those types of companies tried to suck you into.. but we just feel like the amount of Interest we're paying is screwing us over and if there was a way to pay this off faster and move money around to make it work better for us then we'd like to try that we just don't know what to do since we're not familiar with really much more than money coming in and then spending and then setting some aside for a savings.

​

As for the future, we would like to just be set up for money to work for us and to not get back in debt again. Some of the debt, was unexpected when our dogs both needed surgery at the same time, and a separate issue of them both getting Lyme disease at the same time, paired with we put a large chunk of car related expenses on the credit cards, a good $6,000 is sitting there strictly covering tires for all of our vehicles. We have obviously been stupid with credit cards but seeing how hard we're struggling with the aprs and not being able to make a good living with the decent salary that my husband makes is really making us upset and we have a goal to get out of debt and not use credit cards again except for here and there when we have the money to maintain the credit cards staying open. We are dedicated to a plan, we just don't know what the plan is and don't know where to start. We don't know if we should go to a financial advisor since we're not really taking a lot of money to them, rather we have a lot of debt. The 30k in stocks that I mentioned coming up in the winter is being given to my husband with a second promotion that he will be receiving. His promotions are already laid out on the board that will have one in July and then again in december, with the December one carrying an additional raise and the stocks being given to him.

​

I appreciate any insight and advice on all the topics I covered. Thanks in advance!