How Do I Attain Wealth?

I'd like to ask millionaires and billionaires of Reddit something. How do I rapidly pay off my debts and get out of the rut I've been in for the past 15 years?

I mean, I don't want to be super wealthy. I just want to have nothing left in my debt but my house and one vehicle. But it seems like every time I almost get something accomplished, some computer is programmed against me to push me back down again.

Here are my current debt problems. First, though, some background. I'm 41 years old, married, and have two children. One is about to enter college on almost a complete scholarship program (she's gifted). The other is in junior high. I have a house, 1 car, and one SUV. As you read below, I actually have a second SUV, but I don't have to pay on it right now. My occupation is a freelance web developer. My wife's occupation is a school teacher.

My debt problems...

House. The back of my 4500 sq. foot house sunk 2 inches after I built it and after a construction accident by one of our contractors. Unfortunately after we looked at options, because we were the general contractors of sorts on building it, we had no insurance options to fix it. We also had no way to get the contractor to pay because, well, he lied when he said he was bonded. We didn't feel like sending him to jail, so we cracked an IRA to pay it. That cost me $17,000. Unfortunately I was working hard in another city that week and couldn't supervise the repairs. When I returned home, I was angered to find that the foundation contract firm wanted an additional $20,000 to finish it and had only achieved the middle part, not the serious problem in the rear of the house. BTW, we built this 4500 sq. foot house on free land through a family trust, built it during the dot com era where things were going great for us, and when contract labor was cheap. But then the bank rushed us near the end and I was suddenly laid off on 9/11. We built the house for a mere $150K, but then had to absorb a $50K loss from the sale of our old house. So, we have a mortgage of $200K. We then had to tack on a second mortgage of $50K to absorb some credit card debt we had accumulated over the years and during the 5 months I was unemployed, looking for work. Some may say, get a loan to fix the house and then sell it. If we had done this perhaps one year ago before the housing bubble popped, we probably could have gotten, say, $400K for it. We had a lawyer that did real estate transactions stop by two years ago, and he said that houses like ours normally would go for about $400K. However, I doubt we could probably even get $150K for it now that the housing bubble has occurred. So, we have $200K in our mortgage, and then $50K in a second mortage. This is also followed by more credit card debt up to $20K, and two vehicle loans of $900 that will probably owe for another 3 years.

Income. My wife earns $55K a year. I was an IT sysop and programmer earning $65K but then got laid off last year. I wanted to move away so that I could fix the job problem, but because of the house issues, I knew I couldn't afford it. So, the only option left was to become a freelance programmer over the web. I started in January and have managed to accumulate $75K here. By the end of the year, my salary will be $80K, so I'd say I've been very fortunate. We plan to write off a tremendous amount of deductions in order to not owe much in business income tax.

Savings & Retirement. My wife has her teacher's pension retirement. As for my retirement, we've had to dwindle it to pay down debt and it's now down to $19,000. However, because even though I made a good amount of cash as a freelancer, we had unmanageable debt last year that we've been tackling this year with any higher salary I have achieved this year. And when we've needed to ride out rough periods, we started borrowing from my IRA instead of using credit cards. The IRS will let us borrow cash from the IRA as long as we put it back within 60 days and have it paid up by the end of the tax year. Each draw we do, we put it back before 60 days. And we've done like 2-3 draws in a given quarter of this year.

Efforts. My wife has worked hard to pay things on time, reduce late fees, and eliminate debt as much as possible. She said that all this year we have been successful for the first time in 15 years in not using our credit cards. She also took our third vehicle, gave it to her sister for awhile, and her sister will make payments on it for 6-8 months and then give it back after she gets a new vehicle. My wife also managed to put her sister on our insurance plan somehow and so miraculously this brought our car insurance down by $200 a year. When we receive the SUV back in 6-8 months we won't owe much left on it.

More Efforts. I am working on a joint equity website project with one other person and we hope it will pay off my auto loans within two years. The idea behind a joint equity website is that I get paid a little to make it, and then get paid about 20% of its profits after it's built. If it starts to tackle my $20K credit card debt, I'll be really impressed. However, this will be a chain of joint equity website projects that I do with my favorite client.

Risk. As for business insurance, I'm running a bit of a risk right now. I have none. I just pick good clients and hope for the best. I've landed 3 bad clients this year, but somehow managed to get away from them without getting too scuffed up. One bad client refused to pay me $1500 he owed me, and I decided not to refer him to a collection service and just forget about it. And the other risk I have is that my retirement saving had halted while we try to pay down debt and stay afloat right now.