It has been a long, long 5 years and quite honestly sometimes it felt like the day would never come when we'd be free. But we're done!! Our last payment was June 2015, we received the Trustee's notice to stop making payments about a month after that and then we got the notice of final audit in late August and then the discharge came about 30 days later. The day we opened the discharge letter, I immediately started crying. I wasn't expecting all that emotion but it hit me out of nowhere and I felt such tremendous happiness and relief. I think my advice to anyone just started out on this is to be patient, follow the rules and inform your lawyer of EVERYTHING. We documented every conversation with our lawyer just in case. We did nothing to jeopardize our case. There was no way I was going to do this for 5 years and have something affect my case negatively. You gotta follow the rules. We were offered a credit card from Capital One pretty immediately (like a week after discharge) and it's done wonders to jack up our credit scores pretty quickly. I was at 840 when I filed for BK and then after discharge I was at 515. Ouch. One month after using the credit card at only 10% of its limit my score is already at 700. Of course, making car and mortgage payments on time throughout the BK helped I'm sure but it's amazing how quickly my score is rebounding. Thankfully we have learned to live on cash alone - if we don't have the cash for it, we don't buy it. But you do need a credit card to build your credit score so having one we pay off every month is a little bit of a necessary evil.
Thank you to everyone who posts on here and shares their stories. It helped me get through a lot of stress and anxiety over the past 5 years to know I was not alone. And good luck to everyone out there. You can do it. And someday it will all be behind you and you'll be moving forward with new lessons on financial management in your back pocket.
Thank you to everyone who posts on here and shares their stories. It helped me get through a lot of stress and anxiety over the past 5 years to know I was not alone. And good luck to everyone out there. You can do it. And someday it will all be behind you and you'll be moving forward with new lessons on financial management in your back pocket.
Bankruptcy Wizard
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