Here's our situation

[mncarly98]

My husband and I both make pretty decent money and should have no problem paying our bills every month.......we make together about $70K. Only problem is we have too many credit cards, too many toys, and too many bills. We are now $85k (not including the house) in debt. We are thinking about bankruptcy and what it would include, which one to file for, and in the long run will we lose everything. We have a couple motorcycles, a camper........a car and a truck. This is just so frustrating, knowing we could be way ahead but we have just so many "extra" bills. We tried the debt consolidation way with a consolidation company, and it was a total waste of time. Then we sat down with a our local credit union, and we actually were back on track again, but now our spending is out of hand again. Any suggestions would be great, I will keep reading thru this forum too, looks like a good place for some answers.

[keepmine]

How much equity in your home and how many in the family? Any equity in any of the vechicles?
Bk is worthless unless, you get your spending under control.

[woeisme]

If you make over the median income for your area and family size, then you will have to file for CH 13 if you have any disposable income after filing out the schedules for allowed expenses.

Who is spending? You, your husband, both? Have you sat down and had a serious conversation about necessities vs luxury items? What you need to keep, what you have to give up to be financially sercure? My husband and I had to have this hard conversation ourselves before we filed in September 07. It is not easy to do a CH 13 plan, no credit to fall back on when a repair bill comes up, budgeting for bigger expenses, not being able to buy what we want when we want it, etc. But it is so worth it to know that in 4.5 years, we will be out of debt, instead of digging deeper and deeper each year. But a CH 13 takes a committment from both of you, you can't do it alone, each of you need to face financial reality and budget, budget, budget!

Under CH 13, you should be able to keep your house and car(s) and most of your personal items, although you might decide to let some of the toys go if the camper, cycles, etc are just not worth the $ it would cost to keep them. Of course it depends on whether the house and car/truck payments are reasonable, if you have a 500K house and 40K vehicles, you need to re-evaluate, but if you have a normal house and car payment, that should be workable. Good luck!