Hi, I've lurked around here for the last year as my (our) financial situation went from unsteady to collapsed. Credit situation is pure trashed. Foolish choices, living paycheck to paycheck, then, job loss and lived on the cards once unemployment ran out. BF hasn't paid his bills since June and mine haven't been paid since August. We were able to scrape up rent money, barely, to avoid eviction last a few months back but now, we're facing an eviction hearing again this week. My BF was told he could file bankruptcy to hold off eviction to (again) give us a little more time (maybe a few weeks) to find the money to pay our back rent. We both grew up very poor and took care of our families financially so there aren't really any other resources for us as far as getting bailed out and I guess this is our only option right now.
My main question - I'm going to have him ask the lawyer today, too - will this benefit him in anyway if his accounts are already charged off? His credit is already tanked - 300 pt drop - everything closed/charged off. It's really sad because he had 15 year perfect history prior to this last year. He just fell into a depression and couldn't deal with it after we had a lot of other serious losses during the same period of time. We want to stay in this rental because the housing market here is insanely competitive and there's zero chance we are going to be able to get another lease within a 2 hour commute with our current financial situation since we barely got one with 6 figures income, 10 year perfect rental history, and 16 year same job work history. I have serious medical issues and my insurance is local.
We are late 30s, so this is particularly suck and embarrassing but I'm just glad he's finally coming out of the depression to deal with some of these problems. Of course, it may all be too late. He's very close to landing a job a town over and if we reduce these debts, he could even take a much bigger paycut from his last position and I think he'd be hired more quickly in that way. His unsecured debt is fairly large since that's how we paid bills while he was unemployed and I was sick; it's around $50k. We owe friends about $20k. The only good news I know for sure is that if I can get well and he can get hired, we can rejoin the workforce at very close to our old salary and start repaying debts even without bankruptcy. The bad knews is that I just spent all weekend in the hospital and he's still in interview limbo.
Opinions welcomed. We know that we would be spending most of our 40s in a position to have no credit and honestly, we are ok with that after this fiasco. I don't think we want it again. Also, in our part of the country (Los Angeles) buying a house was already a far away dream. We mainly just want to get things settled so we can try to get back on our feet. Thank you for reading. I'm looking forward to hanging around here more as me instead of lurking. You'll probably see a lot of me as I try to build some sort of meaningful financial future over the next handful of years.
