I realized, as I was lurking, that I never finished my story on here. Here we go: Last year, 2009 we canceled our agreement with our attorney and decided to pay our bills on our own! I got all but $300 of my deposit back. No biggie there. I started calling and settling with creditors. That didn't really prove to be very difficult because a few of them still called/sent letters. Several, however, had stopped because we told them we were filing. Just to paint a picture, we had almost $8k in revolving debt. I am still working on some of the payoffs now BUT, already, our scores are slowly increasing. We just bought a car to replace my 7 yr old clunker. My husband also got a CapOne CC...don't worry. We only needed to have one to rebuild credit so no worries we'll relapse. The way we got into such deep debt before was from living check to check....my income from my new job is much higher and our rent is very low (1/4 of my previous mortgage) so we are budgeting well.

Our story is not typical, but we are happy with our decision and excited to payoff the last of our creditors!!