How is anyone affording life in 2026?
I’m lost for what to do with myself and I thought maybe someone in this thread could help me.
I M29 & my wife F29 are married, have a mortgage, 1 child with the 2nd one on the way. I work as a tradie bringing home $100k a year before tax, my wife works admin and brings home $60k a year before tax. But we are seriously struggling financially. We have not gone on a holiday in 3 years, we don’t go out to eat, neither of us do any extra curricular activities, we both work and look after our child and that’s it. But we haven’t increased our savings in 2 years since we bought the house. When we were renting we were paying $200 a week for a cheap old house and when we purchased we knew it was gonna increase up to $600 a week but that didn’t factor in insurance, rates, home repairs & every thing else that goes with owning a home. We are just scraping by paycheck to paycheck and everytime there is a sudden expense (car repairs, broken appliances, etc) it will take our maybe $600 from savings and it’s gone again.
I have a work car provided by my employer, I don’t own a car & my wife has a $15k car on loan so she can drive our children around. But my question to you is how do we afford life? I want to be able to go on holidays, do things outside of work and family, go out to eat on occasion, work to live not live to work. There is also so many things that need doing around the house we bought like new fences, replacing facias, plumbing repairs, new floors, new kitchen, painting, etc, that we just can’t afford and that annoys the piss out of me. I’ve already picked up more hours at work but that doesn’t seem to make a difference because I just pay more tax and I don’t seem to save any of it.
Can someone please help do I need to go see a financial advisor or do I need to be more drastic and sell this house even though I’d probably get less for it then what i bought it for because I can’t keep up with repairs