Bankruptcy Questions???

[M_Vient]

Heres the deal, My husband and I have a home that we owe $330,000, it is only worth about $240,000 with the way the market is. That is $90,000 upside down. On top of that we have about $50,000 in debt. We are starting to struggle and are to the point where we pay mortgage, cc bills, utilities with my husbands income and food, gas, necessities, and toiletries with cc's. If we don't pay for those things with a cc we will be behind on the bills. We have to stay current till December due to the fact that we are in the process of buying another home so we have some where to live when we foreclose. Escrow closes sometime in December. I am a stay at home mom and I go back and forth to taking my daughters to school and pre-k, we have 2 kids. =) So in order for us to qualify for the new home we had to sell one of our vehicles( it was financed and we sold it through CarMax, we owed 15,980.on on the vehicle and they gave us $17,000 for it and the $1000 was used as an earnest deposit for the new home. Now we only have one and I am stuck taking my husband to work at 4am and getting home at about 5am. I wouldn't mind but I have to drag the poor girls out of bed every morning at 4am. So here are my questions:

Can we finance another vehicle before filing while our credit is still good ( it will be after the house closes before we look for another vehicle)?

The only way to stay current on our bills is to pay for groceries, gas and necessities with a cc.... is this okay?

We did two balance transfers to my husbands credit card in at the end of October 2007, they offered a lower interest rate so we did it, but we are now filing. Is this going to look bad? We did the transfer's before deciding that we were going to file.

We each have a very low amount credit card that has a zero balance, can we keep these and not file them? That way we have a credit card to rebuild our credit.

We spend an average of $1,200 a month on food, gas, toiletries, and necessities (EX: Cell phone, which is required by my husbands job.) Is this okay?


If I can get some answers to these question's that would be great. Thanks in advance everyone!

[keepmine]

The last thing your family needs is more debt. Let the house go and rent for awhile. If the only way you can come up with $1K is to sell a car and now, you want to finance a 2nd car on the cusp of bk-well, your post has disaster written all over it.
You need to stop using cc's now and get yourself on a cash basis because, once the bk hits the public record of your credit report, all of your credit cards are very likely to cancel the accounts. You need to get used to the reality of a cash existence for awhile. Those balance transfers could cause some problems if you file in the next few months. How much were they?
Prehaps, post your income and expenses and your state we can get a clearer idea of your situation.

[M_Vient]

The reason why we are buying another home and purchasing another vehicle is because my husband makes about $5,500 a month. Right now all of of bills cost $6,000 a month. Once we file for bankruptcy, the new home both car payments and all bills will total about $3,000 a month. Totally doable on my husbands income. Our lawyer advised us to do it before our credit is shot so we are just making sure that this won't have any consequences. Like I mentioned before, We have no cash to live on unless we wan't our new home to fall out of escrow. I am sorry, but I cannot rent. We did it for 5 years and won't go back. We are located in AZ. In December the house will close escrow and we will go buy another vehicle. Once that is done we won't have a house payment till February and our new car payment will be in February also. We are filing in January. Thanks. =0)