What Can I Do to Become More Financially Secure?

For some background, I am a 28 year old Engineer and I am currently making about $83k per year pre tax. Each pay period, my paychecks are about $2250, I am currently contributing about $200 to a 401k and $350 to an HSA, with the rest going to taxes and other insurance. My monthly take home pay is around $4500. My wife works too, but her hours are pretty irregular and she is still in school so her checks are anywhere from $100 to $600 currently, let’s call it $800 per month. Our total income per month then is around $5300.

I’ve been budgeting/tracking expenses since I graduated and started working in 2022, so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of where everything goes. I’ve broken it down as follows:

Rent: $1500, Eating out: $400, Car payment/Insurance: $700, Gas: $150, Subscriptions: $120, Utilities: $500, Debt: $500, Personal/Fun: $500, Groceries: $600,

Total: $4970

I honestly feel like I’m pretty good on not overspending, but my wife definitely struggles. Almost all of the “Eating Out” expenses are from her going to fast food places almost daily. Other than that, we are usually pretty good. I’ve tried to reduce our spending in some areas in the past, but I can’t really change the major ones (groceries, rent, utilities, car payment, etc) so it just feels pointless.

Right now I’ve got about $1000 in our HSA, $22k in my 401k and basically no other savings aside from that. We want to have kids together eventually, but at this rate I just don’t ever see myself financially comfortable enough to afford something like that.

As for debt, we have about $35k combined in student loans (at about 5%), $20k on our car (at 4.99%). I recently finished paying off about $10k in credit card debt that we racked up from when I was in school and not working as much.

I should add that I do know how privileged I am to be able to work and provide for myself and my wife, and also that I have never really faced any discrimination. I’m much better off than I was 5 years ago, but I just thought things would be better by now. Are there any obvious (or non-obvious) things that I’m doing wrong here? I suspect the car payment is what’s killing me the most. Is it worth it to contribute less to my HSA and 401k in order to pay that off faster?