When we started living together my income was low and he managed the bills. As time went on i started seeing late payment notices and to avoid fights when i found them I decided to take over the money management. He was given $200 a month as a free spending allowance. I knew he had some money issues in the past, credit card dept and a defaulted loan, all paid off before we met. So i should have realized he has some spending issues.

Last year he received two large raises and a job change and i received a substantial pay raise as well. Our household income went from 50k to 100k. After a year of agressively paying down his student loans we now have between the house and his loans we have 97k in debt. Because out monthly bills haven't increased I want to pay off debts and work on saving for an emergency fund.

The issues started when my husband realized how much we now made. He has always been a generous man, but now he buys people food when he is out with his friends. He feels that because we make more we can spend more. He also has been buying alot of video games, eating out, splurging on groceries.

i want him to cut down on his spending but when i bring up when he goes over on stuff it always ends up like im the bad guy. I need a better way to get it into his head that we cant just spend all the new money. To make maters worse one of our cars got totaled and we cleared out our savings (not the emergency fund) to buy a used one. I told him we have to live tight for a while and the next day he is asking if we can go out to sushi!

tl;dr: Our income went up and My husband wants to spend not pay down debts. How do i clamp down on his spending without being the badguy.