Have lost all hope.

[jetset]

Hi Emmy welcome to the board. I remember when I first posted about my situation, I was really worried that I wouldn't be able to file. My attorney told me that my case was probably the easiest he'd ever had.

I used my tax return of $860 to pay attorney fee's and court costs. The attorney nor trustee had no problem with that.

You said you are in the midwest, if by chance you are in Northern Ohio I have a great attorney for you if you need one.

jetset

[Spartan]

I am new here. After reading and browsing around the forum a bit, I realize that this forum provides a very healthy support for members here. That is very nice.

Bk is like a process that enable the phoenix to rise from the ashes....

[lrprn]

See my answer to your questions in red below....

lrprn,

By the way, you couldn't discharge y our Parent Plus loans, right?

Right. The new bk law that went into effect last year made discharging student loans nearly impossible. This debt is one that we'll be paying off even after bankruptcy....sigh...

I guess I'm naive, but what's USJ?

My fault - I shortened USDOJ (U. S. Department of Justice) into USJ. Sorry for the confusion.

Thanks for your concern. It's so nice to come on here and talk to other people who are going through this or who have already gone through it.

So true! We are all very lucky to have such good virtual friends here who really do understand what's going on because they are living it or have lived it themselves. Being able to vent on the bad days and celebrate the good days together makes everything seem a little more bearable. Glad you are here with us!

[yomama]

lrprn,
Yes, our stories do sound similar. We woke up too. Ours wasn't quite as much debt as yours but it wouldn't have taken a very long time for it to get as high. Those finance charges sure do add up in a hurry. We were just barely making the minimum payments and sometimes they'd be late, so they'd sock it to us with a $39 late fee yet! I just don't think that is right at all! Why does the government let these darn credit card companies get away with all the stuff that they're allowed to do??!! And those high interest rates! People who have savings accounts barely make anything at all, yet we're expected to pay these outrageously high interest rates. I think the government wants most of us to be poor. I realize now that my husband and I will never get out of being amongst the poor class.

By the way, you couldn't discharge y our Parent Plus loans, right? I guess no school loans can be discharged. Boy, do I wish they could be! It really doesn't look like my husband will get any jobs as a result of his education anyway, either because of the criminal record or his age or both. Here he was trying so hard to get somewhere and life just slaps you down. Very discouraging.

I guess I'm naive, but what's USJ? You said you had attempted to pay off your debts with a USJ-approved program. I wonder just how many of us attempt to pay off our debts in that way or similar ways only to find out that it just won't work for us and we end up just basically throwing away our money. That's what we did with that debt negotiation company. I think they got over $3000 of our money and we got $1800 back. It got us absolutely nowhere. If only we had known last year what we know now, we would have just filed then and it would all be behind us. I know what you mean when you say about how you dreamed your lives would be after the kids launched themselves. Our son, who is 24, no longer lives with us. He is managing fine on his own now. He flunked out of college and hasn't gone back, but he has a good job now. Our daughter is in her third year of college and wants to go for a doctorate. I hope both of our kids manage their lives better than what we've managed ours. Golden years, HA, what a joke! It's like a friend of mine said to me, "Who the $#%* called these the golden years? They aren't golden for me!" She and her husband aren't rich either, but at least they've never found themselves in enormous credit card debt.

Yes, we're grateful for the chance to start over again, but I really don't think that we'll manage to get any money saved up at our age, not with what my husband makes and what I would make working. It just pays the bills and that's it. I told him we'll be eating a lot of soup and sandwiches in another 10 years or so. Of course, even those aren't cheap anymore!

Thanks for your concern. It's so nice to come on here and talk to other people who are going through this or who have already gone through it.

[yomama]

Cab, Thanks so much for you words of support. Sometimes that's the only thing that keeps me going day to day. I also believe in 'what goes around comes around'. My husband ex-boss and that gang banger worthless kid might be laughing now thinking about what they pulled off, but I believe that they'll get theirs someday. It's hard for me to understand how people can be so heartless as to make someone else look guilty for something. It really upset us when someone told us that there was an article in the paper about the incident, and it really upset us when we read the article. The very first sentence came right out and said that he did what he was accused of, and that was even before my husband decided to take the plea bargain! I thought he'd never get a fair trial if the jurors had read the article. The fact is that my husband would never have anything to do with drugs, but he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The prison had been having trouble for awhile already with drugs getting in somehow, and he unfortunately became the scapegoat and I can imagine his boss gloating over how he found out who had been bringing the drugs in. I told my husband I wouldn't be surprised if his boss had actually been the one doing it, the creep. I have nothing good to say about him or the kid who put the drugs in the envelope that was in my husband's lunchbox.
Anyway, our already bad financial situation turned really bad when my husband got suspended. Thank goodness I was working at the time or else we would have had $0 coming in at all! I do temp jobs and it's been awhile since I've been working. I keep calling the temp agencies and they say it's slow. My husband and I eventually came to the realization that we really have no other choice but to file. I'd rather have paid off our debts, but it's impossible, we see that now. Of course, now we're getting letters in the mail from collection agencies and getting phone calls, but of course we don't answer. I can't wait until this ball gets rolling now because I want them to go away. I want this to all be over with as soon as possible so we can get on with our lives. This isn't what I had in mind when we got married all those years ago. How do you not envy people who have money and don't have to worry about things? I'd love to be able to afford to go to the doctor. I have a sinus infection right now and my head hurts so bad, but we don't have the money. I got a reminder card in the mail saying that it's time to schedule a dental cleaning. Nope, can't afford it. No insurance. Heaven forbid should one of us have to go to the hospital. We don't have any kind of insurance to cover anything except we do have life insurance, not much, but we do have some. I said that for wanting to have so much years ago, we turned out to be about as dirt poor as people can be without actually living out on the streets. If all of our household items were sold at an auction, I doubt that they'd bring more than just a couple thousand dollars total. It's sad to think that this is all we have after 26 years of marriage. No money in the bank. Some things that only work for the half. A mattress that gives me a backache all the time. Our kids probably wonder how they were so unlucky to end up with us for parents. We could never afford to get them much. We always thought things would get better, but instead they've gotten worse and worse.
I'm sorry that you were also accused of something that you didn't do. Life is tough, I realized that a long time ago. So your accuser suffered in some way then, I guess. Guess what my husband just found out. His boss had to go out on disability because of trying to restrain one of the kids at that place. My husband said maybe he's getting what he deserves now. I know it's probably awful to think that way, but I was also here thinking that maybe some kind of justice was served after all. I hate to be a vindictive person, but then on the other hand, my husband and I have both been thinking all along how unfair this whole criminal thing is. He won't ever get cleared of it. He took the plea bargain, which I guess basically means that you're admitting to doing it even if he didn't actually do it, but we felt that was about his only option. What does a person do when he doesn't have money for a lawyer and the public defender turns him away? If anyone ever says to me that our "justice" system is rotten, they won't get any arguments from either of us.

Well, at least there is the option of bankruptcy and at least a big part of our financial problems will be behind us someday, and that will be a happy day indeed. Thank you for thinking about us.

[lrprn]

We might finally be out of debt by the time he's ready to retire.

Yomama, your story is very similar to ours, except I woke up when we owed$80,000 in unsecured debt plus $21,000 in parent Plus loans for our kids' educations. We've been married 27 years and we're 61 and 55 respectively. After an eight-month abortive attempt to use a USJ-approved credit management program to get us out of the hole (wasted $6000 - a sad story for another day), we filed Ch 13 in June. When I dreamed of our lives after our kids launched themselves, this is certainly not what I pictured we'd be doing as we head into our 'golden years'! But we are grateful for the chance to start over, even if we won't have much time to sock money away for retirement. It's far better than the constant worry and stress robbing Peter to pay Paul month after month watching ourselves falling farther and farther behind. Hope you will find the same relief after filing that we have!

[CAB_44]

YoMamma~
I can only imagine what a painful experience you and your husband had to go through for him to be framed in a situation like that~ it's one thing for us to have to have a really strong backbone to file for BK....(stigma thing), but to have to defend your innocence for what your husband was blamed for and NOT guilty of, is quite another.
I am really so sorry for you both on that, that's got to be gutwrenching hard. I can only imagine.
You know, while I've never had that terrible of an experience, there have been things in my life that I have been unfairly accused of. People are going to unfortunatly believe what they want to, and no matter what you try to do to vindicate yourself, they just turn the other cheek and believe what they want~ WELL....I have said this before, but it's SO true~ what comes around ALWAYS goes back around.....hopefully something or someone will come forward in defense of your husband and maybe time will enable him to be vindicated of his innocence. I'm sure he is the honest and good man that you say~ and God ALWAYS pulls for upright and strong. Try to have faith in that God is on your side, and that the matter will be resovled...it may not ever come to that here on this earth~ but I KNOW without and beyond a shadow of a doubt that you, your husband and GOD know he is innocent, and God will bless him for that~ my thoughts are with you and your family that you will endure the pain and heartache that this no doubt has caused~
As I said...when I was accused of doing something that was not the truth~my faith always pulled me through, and in the end....the one that accused me saw my innocence...maybe that person needed to be pulled down a notch~ and guess what~looking back, I see how that one played out... I would never wish any ill on anyone, but this person has turned out to have a lot of problems in their life, and it's been laid out for everyone to see...I feel bad for them, but there's always that part where I (in a humble way say to myself)....see Christina~ what you went through in that situation has come full circle.... but that's all of the thinking I do on it...because I want that circle to end....meaning that I don't boast about it, I just see the reality of what happened and how it turned on them....
Anyway~ didn't mean to ramble, I just wanted you to know (and I'm sure you do) that someone else understands what you're feeling....yours is on a much
bigger scale than mine, but with similarity~
Blessings to you sweetie~
I'm glad that you are here to share your story~ I'm thinking of you~
CAB

[yomama]

Hey Yo Mama & Emmy~
Goodness YM~ your story is so sad~ yet I could relate to a lot of it.
We are all here for the same reason that's true~
I think we'll all be glad we did two things .... 1~ decided to end the debt w/ BK ....and 2~ found this website!
Blessings to both of you and your families!!
CAB

Cab, I guess we all have many things in common. We might have gotten into debt in different ways, but we're all in debt just the same, debt that we feel we just can't pay back and need help. I'm also glad that we decided to go for bankruptcy and I'm also glad that I found this forum. It helps a lot to know you're not alone, and there is some very good advice here.

What I'm really still steamed about is the thing that happened to my husband and getting charged with possession of marijuana when it actually belonged to one of the kids in the prison/juvenile center where he worked. We both had such high hopes for his future, and now I feel that's all been taken away from us by his ex-boss and that kid. Last year my husband finally got his bachelor's degree after all these years (he was 52 at the time), and after that he took some courses towards his master's degree. He wanted to be a vocational rehabilitation counselor (his degree was in social work) and I think he would have been a good one. Now that he has a record, though, he can forget that dream. Not only does he already owe a lot of money, but nobody would hire him anyway. He can see what trouble he has had getting a job, mostly because he has a criminal record. It has never been easy for us. Right now he's a flagger (not a state job) and doesn't get much work. He's been applying for jobs related to his degree ever since last May when he got his degree. He's had so many interviews and rejections it's discouraging. That was before the incident at the prison even happened. So we're both thinking that people also hold his age against him. I haven't been able to find a job in months, so our financial future right now looks pretty bleak. We have to file for bankruptcy and at least get that off of our heads. Here we are, 50 and 53 (he'll soon be 54) and we should have money in the bank towards retirement. Instead, we have a mountain of debt. I wish now that he hadn't gotten his degree because that's 20 thousand that we wouldn't have to worry about. Since you can't discharge school loans in a bankruptcy, he's stuck paying for that, and I can imagine that he'll be paying on that for the next 10 years. We might finally be out of debt by the time he's ready to retire.

[yomama]

Yo Mama,
thanks so much for sharing your story. Even though I am sorry others are going through this it does help to know you are not alone. That lightbulb has happend for me since my first post even. I came in thinking we most likely will need to file for bk to less than a week later just knowing we have no other choices. I also have a dh that does not handle credit well but I am equally responsible because I have enabled him. He already knows that he can never have a cc again and actually doesn't want one. He hates them now, as do I. The only thing I really care about post bk is buying a house one day. A car we can save up for and regular credit we just don't want.

Emmy, Thank you for taking the time to read it. I know it got wordy. This bankruptcy thing is a little scary, but what's scarier is wondering how to get out of our enormous debt without some help. That's great that the forum could help you in making your decision. My husband and I have been thinking about bankruptcy for the past few months, and we've finally decided to just bite the bullet and go for it. We have thought about it long and hard and see this as our only way out of our mess. Sorry to hear that your hubby doesn't handle credit well. I am no longer even carrying a credit card. My husband and I haven't used any for about a year now. The only way I would ever use one again would be if an extreme emergency would come up but that's it. I don't want to go through this again. That's good that your hubby doesn't want a credit card now. That's the best thing. My husband and I both hate them too. They made it too easy for us to do things that we really couldn't afford to do.

[CAB_44]

Hey Yo Mama & Emmy~
Goodness YM~ your story is so sad~ yet I could relate to a lot of it.
We are all here for the same reason that's true~
I think we'll all be glad we did two things .... 1~ decided to end the debt w/ BK ....and 2~ found this website!
Blessings to both of you and your families!!
CAB

[Emmy]

Yo Mama,
thanks so much for sharing your story. Even though I am sorry others are going through this it does help to know you are not alone. That lightbulb has happend for me since my first post even. I came in thinking we most likely will need to file for bk to less than a week later just knowing we have no other choices. I also have a dh that does not handle credit well but I am equally responsible because I have enabled him. He already knows that he can never have a cc again and actually doesn't want one. He hates them now, as do I. The only thing I really care about post bk is buying a house one day. A car we can save up for and regular credit we just don't want.

[yomama]

Emmy, Oh, please don't feel like you're alone in all this. That's why we're here. We're all about in the same situation and are considering filing, are in the process or have been through it all. I can certainly relate in not getting any sleep. I was like that last year and most of this year from worrying about our financial situation. Thoughts would constantly swirl around in my head and I'd be constantly wishing my husband and I had done things differently. I had wanted to stop using credit cards several years ago already, but he didn't want to hear of it. So I thought he knew what he was doing and maybe we were actually in better shape than what I thought we were. I must have been under the belief that ignorance is bliss because I really didn't ever look at the credit card statements; he handled all that stuff. One day when he asked me to write out some checks to pay the credit card payments (we were juggling 7 at the time), I thought, "My gosh, if the minimum payment on this one is almost $500, just what do we owe on it?" Gulp....a little over $22,000, and that was just one of them! The next highest was about $13,000 and four other ones in decreasing amounts, with the lowest one being about $800. I added them all up. I wish there were a crying icon here because that's what I did. I was just beside myself with anxiety when I realized that we were about $51,000 in credit card debt! My husband also owes almost $20,000 in school loans and still owes over $9.000 on his car. I kept wishing I could turn back the clock and do things differently. How could we have been so foolish?! Believe me, I've beaten myself up about this plenty over the past year.

We were barely making the minimum payments on the credit cards. Basically everything my husband brought home in a month went towards paying the credit cards. All we were getting done was paying the interest. I decided we needed a plan. It wasn't actually I who got him to see the light but a psychologist I was going to for various problems, this one being the biggest one. She managed to talk some sense into him. Finally he realized that we couldn't keep going the way we had been. We were in a vicious cycle and I couldn't see how we would ever get those cards paid off. We had very little left over after paying on our cards that we had to charge practically everything. I always heard that if you get to the point of having to charge your groceries, then you know you're in trouble. We were in trouble.

I grew up with the belief that people should pay off their debts. I had always thought that bankruptcy had a stigma attached to it and I didn't want to admit that we couldn't handle our financial affairs, so I decided to look into other options. I did research on the Internet and found a company that negotiates with your creditors to get them to greatly reduce the amount that you owe on your cards. I discussed it with my husband and he agreed that we would do this and that we'd cut up all our cards. We got in contact with this company and they sent us a contract in which we agreed to send $750/mo which would be put into a trust account for us; we realized that our first three months of payments would go to paying their retainer fee. They also had monthly fees of $50 to maintain the account. They actually got two of the credit card companies to agree to settle for half or less of what we owed them. It ended up that we couldn't do either one. The one was a really good deal, but we didn't have the funds at the time to do it, so it fell through. Our $13,000 one would have been reduced all the way down to $3000, plus we'd have to pay the agreed upon 25% fee to the negotiating company (25% of what they saved us), so it would have been $5500 total...a lot less than $13,000. All we would have had to do was to keep paying regularly and those two would have been paid off in several months. We couldn't do it because my husband was suspended from his job without pay (he worked in a prison and was set up by his boss and was charged with possession of drugs, and that's a long story in itself). Suffice it to say that our finances plummeted and we could no longer make our monthly payments and the deals fell through. So much for that.

So now we had two things to worry about instead of just one, as if the one wasn't bad enough. Neither of us were sleeping very well for months until the criminal thing was finally settled. We both feel abused by the system and his boss and the kid who actually had the drugs. My husband tried to get a public defender to handle his case but was turned down. We ended up having to borrow $2500 from my parents to pay a lawyer. What it boiled down to was that we didn't have the money to take it to trial and we also didn't want to take the chance that my husband might actually be found guilty and have to spend 2-4 years in jail for something he wasn't guilty of, so, as unfair as it all is, my husband decided to just take the plea bargain and get that matter behind him/us. At least he could pay the $660 in fines/fees/costs over half a year. Thank goodness he did find another job so he'd at least have some money coming in, although a lot less than what he had been making (and we couldn't even make ends meet on his higher income). Nothing seemed to ever go right and it got to the point where I'd wake up and think, "Well, what's going to go wrong today?"

My husband and I felt we had no other choice but to file for bankruptcy. I felt like we were brought to our knees and I never felt so low in my life. Right away I started worrying about the possibility of losing everything, but from talking to our lawyer (a different one), I think my fears were unfounded and I've settled down about that. Emmy, shop around for a lawyer until you find one that you feel comfortable with and one who you think is filing for you in your best interests, not to pad his wallet. My husband started looking in the yellow pages of the phone book for a bankruptcy lawyer. He called one and arranged for us to have a free consultation. We met with him and felt rushed the whole time. He spent about 10 minutes with us and moved us onto another room where a lady handed us a bunch of papers to be filled out by the time we came back for the second meeting. We were told the whole bankruptcy, including counseling, court costs, lawyer fees, etc. would be $3850. Although I didn't know anything about bankruptcy, I thought WOW, that seems like a lot of money! I knew we didn't have the money for that! My husband and I both agreed that we should see another lawyer. The second lawyer would charge $25 for the consultation, but it would be put toward the entire fee if we should decide to hire him, and we were told on the phone that he'd spend an hour with us. We met with him and I'm so glad that we did. He gave us 1-1/2 hours of his time and explained things to our satisfaction and also sent us home with papers to fill out. He didn't make us feel rushed at all and was very nice. Where the first lawyer was going to have us file under chapter 13, this one said we would file under chapter 7, which I agree with this one. He told us not to worry about losing anything. I must say, he put our minds at ease, and that's hard for someone to do with me these days!

So now we have to do that counseling that I think will cost $65 and the lawyer is working on the papers for us to sign. Fortunately we ended up with enough money from what we had been putting into the trust account with that negotiating company (although not as much as they ended up with) that we have enough to pay the lawyer and other costs. I'm not sure how long this whole process will take, but I don't regret taking this step. It's a way to get out from under this heavy financial burden that we've been struggling with and barely keeping our heads above water. I'm so glad that there is this option; otherwise, I really don't know what we would do. We wanted to take action before any of our creditors actually starts legal proceedings against us, as it's been a year since we've paid on any of our credit cards. Oh yeah, our $51,000 credit card debt managed to accumulate another $10,000 over the past year just from interest and late fees alone. We haven't charged on our cards since the day we decided to let that company negotiate for us.

It's such a tremendous sense of relief knowing that we're getting out of the grip that those credit cards had on us. We charged when we shouldn't have and have gotten ourselves in a big pile of debt that we didn't intentionally try to do. It just happened. You know how you think you have everything under control and then one day you realize that you just can't keep doing it. It's like a light bulb gets turned on and you wonder what had taken over your thoughts for the past some odd years. This didn't happen overnight. We have been married for 26 years, had a credit card or two from the very beginning and managed to keep them paid off every month. We were doing fine with the cards for probably the first 15 years or more. Then this offer came in the mail and that offer. 0% interest for the next 6 months or year or whatever. Transfer your balance at the low rate of only 3.9%. Wow, what a deal! Christmas comes along, the kids' birthdays, school supplies, let's go out to eat because we're too tired to cook, we should go on vacation somewhere to forget our problems (just added to the problems!)....need I say more? Live and learn. I'm not proud of the fact that we're having to file for bankruptcy and I envy people who don't find themselves in this situation, but who knows, maybe the Joneses who appear to have it all actually are very burdened with credit card debt too. I think my husband and I have both learned a very tough lesson through all this. We are just starting the process of bankruptcy but at least I can sleep okay nowadays instead of wondering how in the world we're ever going to get our debts paid. Emmy, you are among people here who know pretty much what you're going through. We understand and we're all in this together. We'll make it! You have to trust that you're making the right decision in filing.

[Emmy]

Kam ~ We are -$1500 monthly based on the means test but we won't have to take that because we make below the median income. I don't have exact figures yet but we pay monthly $400-500 to credit cards minumum payments. Then we turn around and put about $300 or so right back on them for groceries and gas. So we are actually -$300 or so too.

[Kam]

I don't know how a bankruptcy court would categorize such things. Generally, I would think things like sheets, curtains, coffee makers, can openers, and utensils would last more than 5 years so people wouldn't need to replace them during a Chapter 13 bankruptcy. If someone is moving from one place to another where necessities like window treatments aren't provided, hopefully the attorney would be able to help define and explain this.

I look to my grandmother as a guide in such things. She hasn't replaced sheets, curtains, utensils, towels or other such things in many, many years. I would think a set of each would last for at least 5 years through a Chapter 13. Maybe that's why there isn't a category for them. I know she replaced the coffee maker not too long ago, but in the mean time, she used Sanka. That would fall under food, I'd think.

Grace, how many sets of sheets does your Grandmother own? One? Two? How many sets of kitchen towels, bath towels, table clothes, curtains, etc? Curtains do become yellowed and faded by the sun. Towels do become stained and thread bare by the use of washing machines and dryers. Kitchen towels become too stained to be used in the kitchen and have to be replaced. Sheets become stained and thread bare and need to be replaced. If you have hard water like I do, white things become dingy yellow things within a matter of months.

Define a set of towels: bath towel, face cloth, hand towel? One set of towels to last five years? What happens if you need to replace a mattress? What happens if your wash machine shreds up the curtains you've had for the last 10 years?

In my opinion, home maintenance is just that: home maintenance. It's the cost of light bulbs, weatherstripping, shower curtains, liquid Plummer, plastic to cover windows (if you don't have storm windows), rock salt to melt frozen walkways, screens for the furnace, salt pellets for water softening units, screw drivers, hammers, sheets, pillows, electrical tape, duct tape, drapes and curtains, bedding.... these things are not luxuries, they are necessary to maintain a home.

It would be nice if all appliances, big and small, would last a life time. Heck, we have gone through *three* carpet shampooers in the last year because something would inevitably break down! Our landlord installed a new light gray carpet in our living room that is damn near impossible to keep clean! Hence, we had to buy a carpet shampooer. Home maintenance cost? You bet.

Emmy:

From what I have been able to follow in this thread: you say you are approximately -1500.00 every month. Applying your credit card payments to this monthly deficit will still leave you in a deficit...correct? We were in a similar situation, except we were about -$600.00 in the hole, and when we applied our credit card payments, we were about $-300.00 in the hole every month!

[SinkingFast]

My grandmother never declared bankruptcy. I was only offering an example. I would think certain things may not be included in expenses because they last a long time.

So did your parents?? Declare BK that is?? Or prossibly yourself?? Is that why you are here.

People who post here are contemplating filing, are in the process of filing, or have filed. We share information and support each other thru the process.

So which are you??