You need to change the way you think. First, understand compounding. Not just intellectually, but viscerally. You need to develop an aversion to spending borrowed money.

A debt with 22% APR doubles every 38 months.

Every dollar you pay down your debt, cuts the total length of time you will be paying that horrible interest. Every $1 you spend now increases your time to get out of debt, and costs you around $3.70 if it takes you 6 years to get debt free.

Take a look at graphs of compounding interest. They're designed to excite you about saving, but debt grows exponentially too. That should scare you. Set one of those graphs in front of you until it does.

Then, use your intellectual knowledge of compounding to change your real-world behavior. Learn to turn price tags into what it will actually cost you, by multiplying by 3.70. That $150 favor you do paying car insurance for a friend actually costs you $555. Every month. You are out $750 for your relatives in your home country to receive $200. The $2 cup of coffee costs you $8 (don't forget sales tax!). The $7 lunch costs you $28. Splitting a night out with your friends is costing them $150 each, but you're out $550!

But lucky for you, you've got a place to put money where you don't get back only 1/3.7 of its value -- your debts. They work in reverse. Where lunch will have you paying $28 for a meal worth $7, every extra $10 you throw at your credit card debt puts $37 into future-you's pocket.

Start seeing the things you spend money on with their true, just-for-you price tags, and you'll find saying no to waste and eating pasta at home at lot more compelling.

The best part is that if you do change your thinking like this, D Stanley's estimate that you could be out of $66k debt in under 2 years, and back to living life normally, paying for things at the same price everyone else gets, is 100% possible.

My income is 78K to 80K after taxes and insurance.

I pay $1,500 for rent+utilities, $150 for phone bill, $450 for auto loan, $300 for auto insurance (for two people; I am helping a friend who can't pay auto insurance), $750 for a personal loan and $750 to $1,000 for credit card. I also need to send $100 to $200 to my home country. Total monthly expenses are $3,950 to $4,200.

I have a $16k auto loan at 7%, $32k of credit card debt at 20-22% and a personal loan of $18k at 17%. Total debt = $64k.

After the above expenses I need money for groceries, clothes, gas and other monthly needs.

I want to be debt free or at least decrease my total debts from $64k to $10k.

You have dug yourself into a hole. Luckily you have a shovel, and the hole is only 3 years deep.

Time for a concrete budget and savings plan.

1. Reduce your utility costs. Raise the AC temp by 3 degrees. Lower your heating by 3 degrees. Turn off your lights religiously. This could be 10$-25$. So 1475$ cost.




2. Trim your phone bill. Unless you are buying your phone in installments (which cell companies call "get a free phone, just sign up"), you should have a < 50$ phone plan. No home line. 100$ saved. 50$ cost.




3. Tell your friend you are sorry, you can no longer cover their auto insurance, because you owe 10s of thousands of dollars of debt and need to pay it off. Give them 1 or 2 months warning. 100$-150$ saved, 200$ cost.




4. Keep sending the home country money. I am assuming this is a lifeline for one or more people.

Total: 1625$/month.

Debt servicing:
1000$ credit card, 450$ auto loan, 750$ personal loan.

Total: 2200$/month debt servicing.

Income after taxes: 6500$/month.

Annual interest on debts: 16000*.07 + 32000 * .22 + 18000 * .17 = $11220, or just over 1000$/month. Note that this is lower than your servicing.

Grocery: Get a small freezer. Buy some protien you like in bulk, freeze it in freezer-safe bags, raw. Cook batches, spice it. Freeze some. Add a cheap starch. Selection of vegtables (including freezer veg). Buy the "cheap option" (Ie, organic or not? Not.), and go to the cheaper grocery store.

Have a weekly meal plan. Always eat what you cook. Always. Eat it all, and only it. Bring lunches and snacks to work. (Eating out comes out of your 50$ a week spending money, which doesn't go far.)

Note, this can easily consume 5 hours a week in food prep. Budget for that. It'll probably eat in into your existing hobbies and socialization, but cooking can be a hobby, and you can even socialize by inviting friends over to have your home-cooked food once you get half-decent at it. (Feeding people this way isn't free, but is much cheaper than going out to socialize usually)

Unless you are eating ridiculously fancy food, you can manage less than 200$/week this way even in an extremely expensive city, and probably under 100$.

Gas; I'll say 100$/week. Work out what you are spending, make it accurate. Keep reciepts for at least a month.

Spending money; give yourself an allowance, say 50$/week. Any money left over at the end of the week goes into the "I win" jar. Record how high you can get your "I win" jar.

Clothing budget; Start with 50$/week. Yes, this means you don't get to buy new clothes for a little bit.

300$/week, or 1300$/month.

1625 + 2200 + 1300 = 5125$/month.

Leftover: 1375$/month.

You'll note I pinched pennies. This is on purpose; 100$ is only 1/65th of your income, but it is 1/14th of the money you need to pay off your debts.

Put 375$ into a rainy day fund; a different bank account. The remaining 1000$ goes against your debts.

After 1 year, you have a 4000$ rainy day fund (example use: your car explodes), 500$ capital expense (new freezer), and have paid off another 10000$ of debt. You haven't added any debt.

In addition your debt servicing has reduced your debts.

1. 1000$ CC - 587$ interest = 413$ against principle, * 12 = 5000$ paid off




2. 450$ auto - 93$ interest = 350$ against principle * 12 = 4200$ paid off




3. 750$ loan - 330$ interest = 420$ against principle * 12 = 5000$ paid off

And another 10,000$ in CC debt paid off. So after the year you'll have

Year 1

1. CC: 15000$ (32 - 5 from principle portion of payments, -12 from debt clearing)


2. Car: 12000$ (16 - 4 from principle portion of payments)


3. Loan: 13000$ (18 - 5 from principle portion of payments)


4. Savings: 4000$

I'll assume your servicing remains the same, and you continue another year.

1. 1000$ CC - 375$ interest = 725$ against principle, * 12 = 8700$ paid off




2. 450$ auto - 70$ interest = 380$ against principle * 12 = 4500$ paid off




3. 750$ loan - 185$ interest = 565$ against principle * 12 = 6800$ paid off

Year 2

1. CC: 0$ (15 - 9 from principle portion of payments, 6 from debt clearing)


2. Car: 7500$


3. Loan: less than 1000$ (13- 7 from principle portion of payments, 6 from debt clearing)


4. Savings: 8000$ (4 + 4, assumes you burn 500$ of this on some capital good)

You just freed up your CC payment. Your personal loan is almost gone. You are now saving 1000$ (debt reduction) +1000$ (cc payment now debt reduction) +750$ (personal loan now debt reduction) = 2750$/month, or 33k$ a year.

1. 0$ CC - 0$ interest




2. 450$ auto - 44$ interest = 400$ against principle * 6 = 2400$ paid off




3. trivial interest on loan.

Year 2.5

1. CC: 0$




2. Car: 0$ (7.5 - 2.5 principle portion of payment - 5 debt clearing)




3. Loan: 0$ (1 - 1 debt clearing)




4. Savings: 20000$ (8+2 saving +10 leftover debt clearing. 1k capital expenditure)

And that is that. You are financially stable. You have enough savings that if your car dies, you can buy one with cash. (Note: all car loans are bad deals; their interest rates are lies, buying a car with cash gives you a lower price)

Year 3

Savings: 38000$ (20k + 2k saving + 16k debt clearing leftover - 1k capital)

Now you can buy a cheap car with cash and still have an emergency fund.

This is where you want to be. At this point you can consider supporting a friend with car insurance, retirement funds, saving up for a downpayment on a house, buying a fancy phone, etc.

You'll still want to budget. But your budget horizon should now be 40+ years long.

Notes

If you followed this budget you'd actually pay things off faster, because I charged you the interest you owe at the start of a year for the entire year, even though it is decreasing as you pay it off.

About 1 year into this process you might be able to renegotiate your personal loan for a lower interest rate.

Sticking to this will be hard. It will feel like you are living like a pauper. But keep your eye on the light at the end of the tunnel.

Depending on your job, you might not be able to keep your clothing budget down that low. Reassess every 6 months.

Ideally build a spreadsheet that lets you enter your current debts and tells you how long until credit card 0$ is. That is the key point; once you have cleared that pile of high-interest debt, you can redirect the servicing costs to the next pile of high interest debt. And then you are home free.

Right now, your debt servicing is twice as big as the money you can "free up" to clear your debts.

As you clear your debts, your debt servicing will plummet, which means you get more money to clear your debts, which makes the debt servicing costs go down, which gives you more money, etc.

This is called a "virtuous cycle" -- if you can make serious moves towards clearing that debt you can shockingly quickly get out of it.

The bad news is that the cycle works the other way too. Right now, you can make your lifestyle modestly cheap, and have the space to quickly pull out. Increase your debts by another 50% and you will be forced to have a modest lifestyle to tread water, and it would take a decade or more at that rate to pull out. Another 50% and you'll be in an emergency situation, unable to make your bills.

One thing that I don't see addressed in the other answers is this:

I am helping a friend who can't pay auto insurance

You MUST stop this. While I understand, and applaud, the desire to help a friend, you are not in a financial position to do this. An analogy is a toddler who wants to help carry in the groceries and tries to carry in a gallon container that is made of glass. Bad things are going to happen and the toddler is going to get cut.

Follow the steps that others have suggested. Get out of debt and when you are financially strong enough, then you can help others.

The tropes that got you here

There's a core pattern of thinking that drove you here. It is a well known trope, and it has already made you a debt slave. Now, whilst in the middle of it, you must realize what happened and make course corrections. Otherwise this will be your life. Indeed, bankruptcy is the next step in the ever repeating cycle, so the fact that you are thinking that shows how inculcated you are into the pattern.

Trope: Spend if able

The core of the pattern is this logic: Am I able to spend money?

• 
  Yes -> do so ASAP -> high esteem and happiness.


• 
  No -> don't spend -> low self-esteem and misery.

This way of thinking is the path of the debt slave. I almost wrote "it is wrong" but that's a value decision for you.

In this way of thinking, you work for money: money is your boss and makes you do pretty much everything. Money makes you spend when you are able. It makes you carry debt. It makes you go to work. It defines your path, it even defines your happiness. Excuse me, but darn it, this is wrong!

Contrast with my life, where my living expenses are about 1/3 of salary because I go to extremes to make that so. I find fulfillment in things other than spending (like saving!) - some of my rewards are powered by my money stance. I take extended periods on sabbatical because I can. I have a tremendous amount of freedom in my life. I don't literally have to work, I choose to work and I select the most self-fulfilling jobs. I also don't fly out of the office at 5:01pm right into rush-hour traffic, and I don't get "hump day".

Trope: Throwing money at problems (when you have it)

There's a related mindset: Whatever the problem of the day is, throw money at it. This one is very evident just from the few paragraphs you wrote.

The logic is, "Well I have the money or credit limit space, so the easiest path is just spend my way out of this problem". That is different than the next phase of debt slavery, where lenders have cut you off, and now you truly don't have the money. Then, you feel smothering pressure to solve the problem in some other way that doesn't involve cubic money.

Here's the thing. Feel that pressure even when you do have money. Even if you have $24,000 of credit line available, say "NO. I simply do not have the money for the transactions you propose." And put your foot down. (even though, by your thinking, there's some unused credit limit just sitting there!)

For instance, with the hospital, "I CANNOT pay you" leads you to doing some research and finding out their "retail prices" are a racket: jacked up rates intended for rich foreign medical tourists, or suckers. You go to billing and say "Excuse me, if you had done this same work for a Medicare patient, you'd have cheerfully accepted $2145.89. [you just made that up, but they won't check.] Do I look like a rich foreign medical tourist? Given my poverty [credit limit doesn't count toward poverty], I propose $1200 to settle it." And then you haggle from there, and you try to hit a number in the 20-30% range. That's how smart people handle the hospital.

(another gotcha is using an ambulance as a taxi to the hospital. That'll cost you about $1000 in the U.S. Previously, doctor and hospital voice mails said "if this is an emergency, call 911", now they say "come to the ER or call 911".)

Or take the phone. You need to make a lot of international calls to countries where the phone service is a racket? You just grabbed the easiest option, a cell phone with the best international plan you can get at the store. Now if you didn't have the money to spend, you'd have looked much closer at things like Skype or TeamSpeak, or simply do more email communication. Heck, given the stupid cost of international long distance, you could buy them a tablet.

On the car, I choose simple older cars and I developed the skills and tool set to fix them myself. Due to my experience I can just do it; I left my car for awhile and found 2 frozen brakes, so I popped off the wheels and loosened up the brakes down on the spot. It cost me $0 and I was an hour late to my thing. You'd have towed it to a garage and lost 2 days and $1200 doing all 4 corners. That's one of the ways you lose money hand over fist. That and the stupid car and insurance payments. It gets even more explosively bad if you violate Harper's Law: Never owe money on a car that's out of warranty. Because then, BOOM you have a broke car and still owe the full boat on the loan.

Some friend won't pay his insurance? People back in the home country? You can't help them if you're in trouble: Put the oxygen mask on yourself first. Share your wealth when you have wealth. And you don't have wealth right now.

So paradoxically -- Live your money like you don't have it. And then, you'll have it.

For my money (heh), you'll have wealth when you create the patterns of thinking that create wealth. I'm not the first to say that. The people who say that are wealthy.