New here.....have several questions

[SadDebtor2]

Hello Everyone,

I'm new to this forum and wanted to say hi to all of you.

I'm considering filling for bankruptcy (have a meeting with an attorney in 2 weeks to see if I qualify for chapter 7) and have a few questions.

1) I live in California. How much money am I allowed to keep in my savings and checking accounts?

2) I've only recently stopped making credit card payments. However, I ended up using some of my cards to buy groceries, clothes, put gas on my car, eat out, buy a $400 gift card to buy new tires for my car, some stuff on eBay and to get a haircut and color my hair. Those are some of the expenses that I can remember now. Will I get in trouble for having used my cards after stopping making monthly payments? What should I do?

Thank you for your help!

[LadyInTheRed]

Hello! Welcome to bkforum!

In bankruptcy, each state has exemptions to protect your property. In California, if you have no equity in real estate, you can use a wildcard exemption to protect a pretty significant amount of cash. I protected a $10,000 CD and still had exemption left. Even if you do have equity in real estate, it is possible to protect some ash. Click on the link to my blog at the left side of this post to read more about California exemptions.

You won't get in trouble for the charges. But, the creditor could petition to have those particular charges declared non-dischargeable. If the charges are not for luxury goods or services or are for luxury goods and services and are not within 90 days of filing BK, they have to prove that at the time you made the charges you did not intend to repay the amounts charged. That's hard to prove and the amounts involved would have to be pretty high to make it worth the creditor's trouble. Some attorneys will advise you to put 90 days between any charges as a precaution. You can read more on the issue at http://www.nolo.com/legal-encycloped...ankruptcy.html

[Drazil65]

Hi, welcome and just keep reading everything you can on this site, it will be a huge help to you and your bankruptcy. Now that you have made decisions that look like your heading down the path to bankruptcy you should absolutely stop using the cards. You said you have stopped making your payments on the cards right? So you should be able to pay for everything with cash now as the whole point of filing and not having to pay for unsecured debt is that it frees up your income and makes things better. If you are still having a hard time paying for your living expenses and you are not paying your credit cards then something else is wrong.

If what you are saying is that you still cannot pay for everything without cards then time to re-evaluate your living situation. Hopefully you can work it out but you should probably stop using the cards you are going to discharge as now you know you have no intention of paying them back (or at least you are on that path and there is a timeline started). Good Luck!