Spouse just let me know they have $80k in credit card debt. I’m not sure what exactly to do.

I’m on a throwaway account.

My (34 M) spouse (42 M) and I net around $25,000 per month in income. It varies because I own a business, but he is salaried.

We’ve always kept our finances separate and honestly that has been fine with me. My philosophy has been that as long as your credit cards have been set to pay the monthly statement balance off, it’s largely fine. We discuss large purchases, but outside of that we enjoy being on our own to an extent.

We’ve defined household expenses each month and those are all covered. But we haven’t budgeted much beyond that.

As part of applying for a loan to expand the business we had to do what I would consider a forensic analysis of all of our financials. When I told him this, he started crying. I had my suspicions because his checking and savings balance never seemed to move much, and I do our investing, but again I didn’t think much of it overall because we were hitting investment goals and recently paid off a rather modest mortgage on our starter home. I thought we were on a golden path.

It turns out he has around $80,000 in outstanding credit card debt with APRs varying from 23-32%. He has been carrying some of this debt for 14+ years. Minimum payments alone are about $2,200 each month. He told me he was just going to pay the minimum payments until he died (he is 42 and I am 34) and said it was a secret he wanted to keep to the grave. He racked up a lot of this debt from his two previous relationships, which included a lot of domestic violence (a prior partner attempted to kill him via strangulation, and the one before me developed a horrible meth addiction). Neither partners worked for extended periods of time, which caused him to generate a lot of this debt. Outside of this discussion, I’ve only seen him cry when losing his grandparents, so I understand how difficult this is for him. He told me he is incredibly ashamed, and sobbed, which I’ve seen only a couple other times in our 9 year relationship. When I asked why he didn’t bring this up, he said it was because of his mistakes and his prior relationships and asserted that I shouldn’t be burdened by it.

All of this is to vent slightly, but ask for advice on how others may have done it.

Obviously the first thing we are doing is setting and committing to a budget. We currently travel a ton because I can manage most of the business remotely and he is remote, which is typically great, but obviously needs to be scaled back immensely given this new information. I am hoping to apply a few thousand extra dollars per month to start working down this debt.

Current goal is to start on the $32k on the 32.99% interest card (avalanche method).

We are also accepting any advice on how others have accomplished this.