Question about paying bills AFTER filing...

[JEM]

Talk to the CU--the bankruptcy department both before and after you file. Since a CU is a community of members, and for one member to declare bankruptcy, that member is considered to have let the community down, so your accounts will be frozen or closed. At least that is what happened with us. 'Hub spent a couple of days on the phone with the BK department of our CU and got our accounts unfrozen. We had a car loan which was current, and we kept it so. 'Hub had also been a member of this CU for more than 40 years, and wanted to remain with them. It took about ten days for the accounts to be unfrozen, and the CU people were very nice. They also reversed several NSF fees that had accrued from checks that bounced while the accounts were frozen.

I should also add that our CU is in another state, so that is why we had to use the telephone.

Good luck!

Won't talking to them before send up red flags? It will be filed this afternoon I suppose. So we could call them up today and talk with them. Will this stop accounts from getting frozen, or will they do it anyway?

I'm so worried we're going to starve, go without gas to get to work. Lights are going to get shut off because we haven't paid...you know, worst case scenarios.

What happens if things come through and they overdraft them? We'll run up a bunch of fees that we can't pay. Can they do that to us? When the money is IN the account (but frozen)?

I hope I'm worrying for nothing and this is a non-issue at our CU.

ETA: We've been with this CU for 8 years. That's part of the reason we figured we'd stay with them. We're keeping the car, and good standing with them. We thought we would be fine, especially since the attorney said they'd not had any problems with the big player CU's in town. I plan on asking him specifically if they freeze accounts today. And go from there I guess. Appt. is at 11am.