Feeling Discouraged

Hello all,

My wife and I started our Ramsey journey in May of 2023 and I am starting to lose steam. These last few months have brought on several emergencies that are going to set us back potentially years. I want some advice from those who have been able to push through this sort of thing.

To give some background my wife and I did college the exact opposite way than what Dave suggests and we both graduated with 60k in loans (120k total) in 2019. We got married in 2020 and moved into a dirt cheap slum apartment and started slowly working to pay off our debts but in a very daveish way. in 2023 we took FPU and started going gazelle intense (literally a month after we bought a house so we didn't do that Dave's way). I sold a bunch of stuff and my wife and I both got raises that helped us go down to where we owe about 32k total now (2 loans at 13k and 1 loan with 6k left). If everything went perfectly we could have been debt free this year.

Unfortunately in December our furnace died during a cold snap. We had to have it replaced immediately and that put us back $7900... lucky for us we had 6000$ for BS1 because we knew we were in for a long BS2. Then in January I filed our taxes and guess what, we owe $3500 to uncle Sam! We claim literally nothing and had $28000 in deductions after interest on our house, loans, and tithe just barely under the limit for itemized deductions. Then this month my boss informed everyone we would not be receiving bonuses this year (he had previously mentioned to me multiple times that I would be getting 6-8k as I am part of the executive staff). I know I shouldn't have counted on this money as guaranteed but I did receive a bonus the last 2 years (not this much) so I thought I could count on it again.

To top it all off our insurance on our home has increased so much over the last 2 years (no we do not live in an area with natural disasters) that our mortgage payment is now $400 more per month than it was when we bought the house.

I feel so discouraged, I'm doing everything by the book (except the 1000 Emergency fund), we have never had car payments (both cars are 15+ year old rust buckets). We don't eat out hardly ever, we don't go on extragent vacations, we budget our individual spending, We both have decent jobs and make a combined ~$120,000 before taxes. I haven't been putting into my retirement since I started this and that is starting to stress me out as well. I've started to look for a second job to work evenings or nights but my wife has vetoed that as we will literally never see each other if I do that.

How do I maintain hope in this? How will we ever be able to have kids? I'm 27 and even getting to baby step 3 seems like a pipe dream let alone putting 15% in my retirement.

EDIT: We take home about $7500 after taxes every month. Also our student loan interest rates have maxed out at about 10%. They were initially around 3%. Home interest rate is 6.5%