Advise needed

[Tman]

My wife is violently opposed to me filing a Ch 7 BK to eliminate $30K in CCs with pymts of $800/mo. I stopped paying them in December because I just don't have the money. I am 2 months past on all of them. I have liquidated a 401K and may have to cash out on an IRA just to pay the basics. I am self employed and my income has dropped to about 1/3 of what it was. She thinks if we just work harder we can get through this. She keeps telling me I should take a job, until we are over the hump. I have been self employed for over 10 years, so as far as the real world goes I may as well have been in prison for all they care. She can go fulltime at work which would bring in enough to cover the payments, but then she would be working 80 hours a week for the crooks she works for (a famous non-profit). Our daughter will be graduationg and heading to college, but this should mostly be paid for with scholarships, grants and some student loans. I have tried to explain to my wife, that even if everything went back to the way it was, we still would not be in position to help our daughter, and if things stay the way they are we will definitely not be able to help. If I could rid us of these CC's and things picked up, I could cover the basics and we would still be able to help our daughter out, so that she can get through college w/o debt. My wife has a moral aversion to BK, as did I before this meltdown started. She completely disagrees with me about the banks, she feels we have an obligation, and she refuses to understand that we have a bigger obligation to ourselves and our family. I didn't ask to have my legs cut off at the knees by the banks and government. I just don't know what to do.

[ROB37LAW]

This may help....I found it quite informative.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Banking/BankruptcyGuide/WhyGoingBrokeIsaFactOfLifeInAmerica.aspx?page=1

[nerves]

Keep in mind that if you are a S Corp and have assets with your business (you didn't say what type of business), they will be part of your bk. I just went through this with a business and we liquidated everything due to bk. The business is what led us to bk to begin with. Good luck to you.

[lrprn]

Your wife is in denial. You need to sit down with her and show her the cold, hard financial numbers that prove that how no matter what you do, there's just no way to pay the debt off before it overwhelms you both - in fact, you're on a downhill slide with an even worse financial disaster than your foreclosure waiting for you ready to pounce.

My husband was also very resistant to filing - in his case, because he was the primary driver of our financial bus and had a hard time admitting he'd made some very poor decisions. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on because he hid everything from me very carefully. Once I realized we were in serious trouble, it was too late. We tried debt management first - a total waste of time and money. Once I worked out the real figures, it was obvious that bankruptcy was our only hope. Still he was sure that "things would turn around." I dragged him kicking and screaming on our free initial consultations with three bankruptcy lawyers. By the fourth he finally had to admit that we had no choice but to file.

Now he thanks me for pushing him so hard, and says that left to his own devices, we would now have no retirement and no house and we would *still* have to file bk. Instead we still have both retirement and house, have some emergency savings for the first time in a decade, we stick to a strict budget, and we make all our financial decisions together. Our five-year Ch 13 is a just little more than a year from being done, and then we'll be free of all unsecured debt. We both agree Ch 13 is the best thing that could have happened to us.