I can understand this couple. DH and I were this couple...but on steroids. We made more money than this couple actually. On the other hand, at one time, our credit card debt was more than twice theirs.
I wouldn't say I am sympathetic to them. I wasn't sympathetic to myself. I knew a lot of it was our bad choices. But, I can understand it. Yes, we lived above our means. And, we had great means (over $300k a year income toward the end). We did have 3 kids and our kids had a lot things that needed a lot of expense. One child had weekly therapy for years. Another child was in a very expensive therapeutic school and then private school for years (unusually, I was delighted when he got to college because our annual tuition costs went down). Some of these needs resulted in some ancillary costs that were very expensive but I could never square the circle to find a way out. Child related costs for these non-typical things were about $80k a year for about 6 years. This was over and above the "normal" child related costs.
I am not sorry about spending that money. That said -- we didn't adjust our other spending to better allow for it. We made enough money that we could have handled this much better had we adjusted all of our other spending. But, we didn't. We went on expensive vacations. We ate out a lot. We went shopping every weekend. We didn't really spend a lot of money for what I would consider ostentatious stuff. We spend way less for a house than our income would have qualified us for. We had nice cars but not insanely high priced and always kept them for a long time. It was more the little things that added up. We could have handled them fine if we didn't have those extra child related expenses. But we did have them and we didn't adjust everything else to compensate.
Could we have managed without getting into debt at all? I am not sure. There were a couple of years that due to child related stuff were really high in cost and earlier on (before our income was that high) maybe we would have gone in debt even without the discretionary spending. But, we certainly could have minimized the debt to a lot less than it was.
That was a long time ago now. We eventually got out of debt. We never missed a payment and had great credit. This was a time when it was easy to get 0% credit card interest by doing a no fee balance transfer. So I just switched the debt around a lot. I rationalized we would have the debt now but would be able to pay it back later.
But -- it got more difficult. Credit card companies started getting rid of the no fee 0% deals. We were starting to have to pay interest. The minimum payments were eating us alive. We had to put new spending on a credit card because our income was going to making minimum payments. At the time we had a house that had a fair amount of equity in it. I proposed to DH that we sell it and use some of the equity to pay off a good part of the debt. We did that, paying off about half the credit cards as I recall.
We lived in a rental for about 6 months then bought another house. With our monthly debt much smaller it was easier to pay off the debt. My rule was that any credit card usage in a month had to be paid off that month. By then our income was at the higher end so that helped a lot. We cut out a lot of the frivolous spending. We did continue with what we felt was the necessary child related spending. It took 2 or 3 years but we paid off all the debt.
Oh -- on the retirement front -- I wasn't too worried about that. DH had always contributed to his 401k for many years. Also he worked for a megacorp where he could either take a pension or lump sum. I hadn't had a 401k for a lot of my career but in recent years had had one so I also had retirement funds. All of that money was going to be available. Basically we did have savings, just all pre-tax.
It has been over 10 years since we paid off the debt. We have never had problems with credit cards since then. We pay them off monthly. One thing about the debt pay down though was that we got used to living on a lot less than the income we had then.