chapter 7 question.

[deesown]

My wife and I have much CC debt. I would say about 35K to 45K.

I am the only one that works. I bring home about 4,000 that being with overtime. Without overtime I make around 1800 every two weeks. . It is not guaranteed. I roughly make about 75,000.000 a year. Last yr i made 82 thousand but I worked a bunch overtime. My wife cannot work right now because we have to little ones at home and she has some medical problems as well.

There are around 5 CC's in my wife's name only that have already gone too collections ( some being 2 yrs. old). and which total around 10K. We live in California so im assuming if she gets sued they will Garnage my paycheck even though they aren't in my name.

The rest of our CC's are getting paid but we seem to be only paying the interest on them and getting nowhere as to paying them off. We have been late on a few of these but i have paid minium on them every month.

We do not own a home we are renting. We would like to buy a home but at this point would not qualify as our credit is over extended and with the late payments we probbaly have bad credit and would never get a loan at this point.

The only savings we have is 6,000 dollars which we are thinking of using to buy a used car. We only have one vehicle which has been paid off already, but it's getting pretty old ( 1990) and won't last much longer.


We do not want to file BK but at this point my wife figures are credit is bad and we wouldn't qualify for a home anyway whether we have BK or not.


I just want to ask if you think we would qualify for chapter 7 or maybe not with the new laws> We live in California so I don't know if that makes a difference.


Lastly, if we do not qualify for chapter 7 would my wife be able to file individually, without my income being considered?


Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much for taking the time to read this.

[325Falcon]

Sounds like you are already bankrupt. Why put it off and throw away good money after bad. You can be free of the debt in 6 months.

[6ftladycop]

Sounds like you might have to file anyway. One word of advice, as easy as filing sounds, you really have to be careful about what is in your name, what is in your wifes name, the vehicles and their worth and how bad credit beyond what is going on now will effect you.

I mention this only to say that before I filed, I did my homework. I made sure my rented apartment was a place that I could still afford beyond bankruptcy because I knew it would be hard for me to rent a nice place again with bad credit(its not impossible, but they make it real hard on you). I also made sure my vehicle situation was in order so as not to be in a position of not having a car because it was taken by bankruptcy court because of value and having little kids that depended on my to transport them from place to place. This is probably the most important thing to investigate. A lot of folks that file do not realize that if you have anything of value that the bankruptcy trustees can sell to give money back to creditors, its outta here unless you qualify under the Means Test. Short story Means Test is the governments way of seeing wether you qualify based on your income for Chapter 7 complete liquidation of your debt or Chapter 13 where you pay back your creditors with court supervision. Talk to all the folks on this site. They were real helpful to me and they had a whole world of good advice.