New here, couple of quesitons?

[dancersmom]

Hi all, well, I never thought I'd be here. But, we give up, after major health issues the past 3 years (6 surgeries) between me, hubby and daughter, we just can't cover all the medical bills/cc bills, etc. We are current on our mortgage, but that's about all. We met with an attorney last week. He was great, and we made a down payment, so he can start dealing with all the collection calls for us. Because my hubby has been working tons of OT the last 3-4 months to help out with bills, we need to hold off filing BK until at least Jan./Feb. or we're just over the income levels for a family of 4. Has anyone here had much experience with stalling the bill collectors? I'm going to call/email our attorney about this, but in the meatime thought I'd ask here --Should we just give them BS stories about making payments? Some of the bills are only 1-2 months behind, but a couple are 3 months. GEMB calls constantly, and we've just been letting the phone ring, and the machine pick-up the call. Thanks for any advice/suggestions. I'm sure I'll be visiting here regularly, as I've lurked for 2-3 weeks now, just absorbing all the info.

[zpbk13]

Welcome! You have come to the right place. I remember being at the beginning of our bk journey back in January and I was so scared of the unknown but this site and the knowledgeable people here helped me so much.

We stopped paying our bills in January of 2009 and filed our chapter 7 on August 19 so that's about 7 months. The collection calls were relentless - at work and at home - until we paid our attorney a retainer and referred the collection calls to her. It seems like you have already taken that step. When a creditor would call I would merely say that they should contact my attorney. They would try to ask me more questions and I would repeat her contact information and let them know I was represented by counsel and they could direct any questions to her. I held firm on that. Only a couple tried to give me a hard time so I told them (talking over them because they were rude) that I was only going to repeat the information one more time and then hang up because I knew the call was being recorded. That was it. No more calls. We did that about 3-4 months into not paying them. Now we are waiting on discharge. It will be such a relief to get our fresh start. We can hardly wait!

[frogger]

I missed my first payments last month. I do agree with you that GEMB is relentless. They start at 8:01 am and call until 8:59 pm. Anywhere for 3 to 20 calls per day. I don't answer any of them, they all go to voice mail.

I'm not too worried about them. Everything is coming together and they won't have time to take any action that can not be stopped.

Good luck.