What to tell my creditors?

[GaPeach]

My husband and I will be filing BK as soon as we save some money for the lawyer. I am going to stop paying my cc with the July statements. What do I tell them when/if they call. Should I tell them I am filing?

Thanks I am new to this board and I am very nervous about this process.

[tleeburks9585]

tell them you have filed bankruptcy chapter 13 and give them your lawyers name and number. that is all. no more. no less. screw your creditors. most importantly. DONT PAY THEM ANY MORE MONEY!

[kornellred]

The creditors (probably) will not start calling until you are more than one month behind in payments. What they will do immediately is add late fees and increase your interest rate. The best thing to do would be to get an attorney on retainer after your decision to file for bankruptcy is firm. Then, refer the creditors to the attorney when they call. Chances are they will no longer try to contact you. They have nothing to gain after they know for sure that you will be filing.

And - just so you know - bankruptcy is completely impersonal at the operative level. No one cares why it came to this for individuals - not the attorney, not the trustee, not the US Court, not the creditors. Your family and friends may have issues with your decisions, but they will get over it.

Good luck!

[lrprn]

Welcome to BK Forum - glad you found us!

You are not obligated to explain yourself when the creditor calls begin. In fact, there's nothing requiring you to even speak to them if you don't wish to before retaining your lawyer. If you do decide to talk to them, just leave it at "If we could make a payment now, we would." Then politely hang up, even if they are in mid-sentence. DO NOT pay them any more money, no matter how enticing they make sending in even a partial payment seem.

The easiest way to get through this period of intense calling before you file is if you have a landline with an answering machine to be sure to put a message on that clearly identifies you and your husband - that way the creditors have no reason to call anyone else looking for you. Let the machine pick up, then if the creditor leaves a message, just note who it is then delete it. Allow your machine to screen the calls for you.

Others have gotten a "pay as you go" cell phone and given the number to family and friends, then turned off the ringer on their phone to not hear it. Another option is to set aside specific signals for family to use when they call - for example, allow the phone to ring twice, then hang up and call back.

There are LOTS of ways to beat the creditors at their intimidation game. You just have to realize that you have WAY more power in this situation than you realize!

Do a search here in the forums for lots of other creative ways to deal with creditor and collection calls before filing - there's a lot of them!

[dragonnfly]

You can tell them if you like but in general it wont do much good until you have a case number. I told them all some would ask when and then would put a hold on the calls until that date. Others just kept calling. I did figure out that most of them if I answered the phone the first time they called each day wouldn't call again that day. generally if anyone came over I shut the ringer off. Little crazy there near the end. Dragonnfly

[Flamingo]

What we did - as mentioned previously, you will not get any calls until after your bills are 30 days late. Then they will start. Get over the guilts. If you don't have caller ID, get it now and watch who calls when you are home and if you don't recognize the caller, don't answer. Let the answering machine get it and lrprn's suggestion as to an identifiable greeting with your name is excellent. However, it you just can't stand not talking to them, you can answer the phone if you wish and tell them you are in the process of investigating BK and retaining an attorney and you should have a filing number shortly. They will probably give you a number to call when you get that information. We kept a listing by our phone of creditors who called. We talked to each creditor and if they called again (identifiable via caller id) we did not answer it. We wanted to advise each of them of our situation and that was it (you, of course, do not have to do that if you don't want to). When we retained our attorney, he gave us a card and told us to give that information to calling creditors. We answer the phones again and provided that information to calling creditors. They also asked for the filing number which we did not have yet. But the calls went down tremendously when we provided the attorney's name and number to them.

There are many great suggestions on here and it's up to you what you want to do personally to handle it. Some people are just able to ignore the calls while others may freak out and want to provide all sorts of explanations. The only information the creditor wants is to when they can expect payment. When they know you have retained an attorney and are filing, they get an answer.

As you can see, your answering machine can be your best friend during the entire process. But after filing, the calls eventually do stop as each creditor receives the filing paperwork.

[AngelinaCatHub]

There are some creditors that use a blanked phone number. On my machine it usually is all zeros. I don't answer that one at all and let it roll on the voice mail. Once you get an attorney simply tell them the attorney's name and phone number and refer them there. 'Hub

[Flamingo]

There are some creditors that use a blanked phone number. On my machine it usually is all zeros. I don't answer that one at all and let it roll on the voice mail. Once you get an attorney simply tell them the attorney's name and phone number and refer them there. 'Hub

Your main creditors will usually be recognizable at first when they call; when/if they turn the matter over to a collection agency after you are past due a few months, you will then get "Unknown," "Unavailable," the name of a state (i.e., Colorado), or all 0's as you state above, or some other format you don't recognize. Then you just don't answer the phone cause you really don't know who it is, creditor or telemarketer!