Question credit cards ?

[ferfermom]

I am so glad to have found this board! We live in Washington state.

We retained an attorney last week. He feels we will qualify by means test for Chap 7, however I have a feeling we will be doing chap 13. He told us to stop paying our credit cards. We need to save up around $3000 to pay attorney, file, and reaffirm mortgage. It will most likely take us 3 to 4 months to save that up by not paying our credit cards.

I am terrified to stop paying them! Is that wrong? I am so afraid of wage garnishment & lawsuits. We owe $82,000 total on 8 different accounts. What can I expect from the card companies besides the phone calls ?
Should I answer their calls or ignore them? What do I tell them? Thank you everyone for your patience with me :-)

[jadams]

If you only need 3 or 4 months, it's extremely unlikely you'll get to the point of lawsuits. They can't garnish without suing you first (credit cards that is, student loans are an exception).

What will happen is lots of mail and lots of phone calls. Lots of calls. I might suggest getting a free Google Voice number and changing all of your accounts to that number prior to when you stop paying. They will still save the old number, but it might weed out a lot of the calls at least at first.

Oh. And login and download all your old statements before defaulting. They'll turn off your online access and it's difficult if not impossible to get them to give you statements post-default if you need them for the bankruptcy or anything else.

[ferfermom]

thanks jadams, good idea about downloading card statements. I do all my bill paying online, and dont receive paper statements. How far back do you think I should go?

[lrprn]

How far back do you think I should go?

Visit the online websites, then print out your non-secured cc records and any other unsecured account payment records for at least six months back, preferably a year. If the site allows you to do so, download and save the monthly account files to your own computer hard drive as well.