Newbie - filed 06/30

[brokejoker]

Hello all. Newbie here. The house of cards finally collapsed.

We had great credit until DH got into an accident and couldn't work for 5 months. He didn't qualify for disability or unemplyment since they held his job and he was only out 5 months. In that time I "did the right thing" and contacted our creditors to let them know our situation and to see how they could work with us. HA!!! I was told over and over they would notate my file but nothing could be done until we were late on payments.

Two months later the savings was gone and we started paying late. Next thing you know our credit limits were slashed and our 2%-8% credit cards went to 24.9%-31.9%. New minimum payments were outrageous.

DH finally went back to work, we racked up some MORE unexpected medical debts. Add that to the interest and fees inflating our credit card bills and our debt ballooned from $25,000 at the beginning of this mess to the $135,000 it is today. Optimists that we are, we tried to settle credit cards and come up with a 5 year plan to pull us out of debt.

Then we got the papers served for two lawsuits totalling $26,000 of the CC debt and met with a lawyer last Friday. On Monday I turned in our paperwork and on Wednesday we filed Chapter 7. I feel like a 10,000 pound weight has been lifted off of us!

No word yet on our 341 but thanks to this forum I'm not sweating it. I'm praying that in 4 months we will be celebrating our fresh start!

[freshstart12]

Wow. I could have written this exact post but instead of medical bills, our income decreased more than 50% over the last 18 months. We are self employed - construction - and with this economy just lucky we still have any business at all.

But same thing happened with contacting creditors, trying our best to get put on debt management plans with the credit cards after they jacked up the interest from 0% to 29.9%. But we couldn't keep that up for more than a few months. We just had to do what we had to do.

No law suits but we filed 6/22/10 and do feel so much better.

GOOD LUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't wait until this is over. Our 341 is July 23rd. Our attorney says we have a piece of cake trustee. I sure hope so. I wanna be in and out of there as fast as possible.

[epiphany]

Welcome and good luck!

ep

[LizardTail]

Same Story Also

Same thing here, except for the medical.

Lost my job, was late on ONE credit card, they ratted to all the others and boom, down went the limits, up went the payments. The calls to the creditors did nothing.

After I filed, I never looked back and the time FLEW by. That's $60,000 I'll never have to worry about again. Screw the black mark on my credit for 10 years, I have a house and a car and a good job now, all is good.

[empowered]

When my own house of cards collapsed a few years back and I realized that my chief creditor, a company I'd done business with for 20 years, would refuse me a payment plan that would allow me to catch up, I wrote letters to legislators complaining and advocating for laws to force credit card companies to provide payment plans to customers.

If credit card companies were prevented from demanding huge amounts that most people cannot pay and then putting them into collections when they can't pay these amounts, many people would probably not want to or be forced to file bankruptcy to protect themselves. IMO, offering payment plans should be the price of doing business for corporations profiting off of the unsecured debt of credit cards.