I don't even know where to start. We used to have excellent credit a couple of years ago. However, I had a high risk pregnancy which required me to be on bedrest the entire time. Our daughter was born 4 weeks early. She was ill and would turn blue. Went to several specialists. I had surgery 4 months after she was born. Then she had surgery at 8 months to bronch out her lungs. During preop testing it was discovered she had a hole in her heart. After surgery, she ended up going on antibiotics for three months to clear the infections out. I had emergency surgery a month after hers. We have been struggling so much. We made stupid mistakes and lived off of credit cards for awhile. Anyway, last November, my husband and I both ended up in the hospital at the same time. He ended up back in the ER in December. We also found out why I had been sick after seeing specialists and it was lupus. I am on the mend with drugs for the lupus. My daughter's hole in her heart closed on its own. She is doing much better medically. Also, before the card act came into play, my husband ran up the emergency card without telling me. I missed the payment and all the cards went into universal default.
We quit paying on the cards in the fall 2010. Our house went into foreclosure in January. I got it out of foreclosure by agreeing to a repayment plan. That plan will be repaid on April 1st. However, now most of our cards have been charged off and gone to collections. The big ones (2 $10k ones and a 7k one) I have worked out 5 year repayment plans on. However, a bunch of small ones have gone to collections (7k and a 5k one and then several with less than 1k on it). I am doing PFD on some of the small ones (4 of them right now). I am TERRIFIED of being sued.
We are trying to decide if we should do bankruptcy. I have a good govt job. So does my husband. So I doubt that we will qualify for ch 7. We will most likely qualify for ch 13. Of course if we do get sued. I will immediately file.
I want to be able to keep both cars and our house. We do not live extravagantly. We have basic cable and roadrunner internet (internet is used for a variety of things like school for my daughters and work for me and husband). We have no landline phone. We have a cell phone package that is the basic package. We do not have smart phones or anything. We have 2 2005 Ford Explorers that we need to keep. We both need a car because we work in different cities.
How do they figure living expenses. The one thing we let our daughters do is dance. That runs about $150 a month. We can pay utilities, house, childcare, cars, insurance, food, dance and we have about $1200 leftover after that.
Any advice?
