Sorry to hear about your situation. I have some ideas while bored sitting here at 3 AM, but whether they are viable depend on specifics of where you live, what you have, what your skills are, etc and some or all of it may not be useful.
The way I see it, there are 3 paths out of spiraling debt - increase income, decrease expenses, and stiff the creditors. Each option has its challenges and they aren't mutually-exclusive.
1. Increase income - this one has the greatest impact. Expenses can only be cut so much and stiffing creditors is an automatic 7 year trip to the credit doghouse. If physically able, you need some kind of 2nd job or side hustle. Ideally these are things with the highest possible payoff and the least possible actual "work" involved. Some ideas -
Transcribing things online - Pays about a dollar an audio minute, you type up what you hear. Easy to learn how to do it and can do it from home, but you do need to be able to type fast and have a stable internet connection. While AI is gradually replacing human transcription, there are still places that require the accuracy of human transcribers, like video production houses. The key is not to apply at a generic service (which pays dirt), but to reach out to a specific place to transcribe specifically for them. Earning that way is arond $14-20 depending on typing speed and requested format, which is not fantastic, but it's great for something you can do at home at any time of your choosing.
Retail arbitrage - choose a hobby, industry, pastime that you know well and check sites like Ebay for what things are selling for. Then, search any buying venue like FB Marketplace, Mercari, Craigslist, thrift stores, flea markets, etc for the same items being sold well under market value and flip them for max value. Many people don't know or care the true value of what they are selling and just want to get rid of it quickly, some even offer the whole lot for free. The key to success with this one is to stick to a niche rather than trying to flip generic junk. I started flipping just for fun only in a specific hobby and that ended up becoming the basis for a whole business now that I know that hobby so deeply and have so many connections built up. You need to be able to keep your car and afford gas and maintenance for it in order to do this, though. Sometimes, I am on the road and/or on my feet all day when sourcing or selling at events.
Stock/crypto exchange arbitrage - Works the same way as retail, identify two exchanges where the price of the same asset has desynced for whatever reason. Buy the thing from exchange A and sell it on exchange B until the price equalizes again. While there is risk to this and you'd also be competing with bots/people who do this for a living, it's also something you can do from home anytime you want. You can also set positions on both sides of a nice spread and make markets or liquidity pools, although there is the obvious downside that this locks up funds and brings in yield very slowly. Crypto is a whole risk universe of its own, but arbitrage is very low risk, just need to be fast enough to jump an opportunity before the window closes. The closer one is to bankruptcy, the more appetite for risk could be acceptable, and there are many exotic opportunites in crypto that don't exist in traditional finance for ordinary people, but it's definitely NOT for everyone.
Paid volunteering - This is one of the reasons it pays to put down roots in a community, you can ask around to see if any place needs volunteers (and pays them). The one I currently do is at a house of worship, where no experience is necessary and the nicest people you can imagine train you. In addition to this making Sunday another earning day, they also offer weddings and funeral coverage. Did you know you can make $75, $100, even $200 an hour filming a funeral? Every time I'm offered one, I wish I got into the death industry from the get-go! Admittedly, I get those higher rates cause video production is my actual job, but some funerals pay a flat rate to the whole team so you don't need to be a lead or the such to walk out with a nice chunk of change. As an added bonus, many houses of worship will give you free food from the donation pantry if you are in need. I'd have moral trouble taking food from one even if I were starving on the street, but they do want the food to be used.
Dumpster dive college campuses and tech stores - Rich college students literally throw away fully functional Macbook Pros and the such. Tech stores likewise throw away perfectly good gadgets. If local laws and personal ego permit it, dive away and sell it all. Sadly, many dumpsters are privately owned so they can't be touched.
Selling things you can find in nature - This one will certainly not work for everyone, but I am including it to encourge outside-the-box thinking. When I was really desperate for money, I went to beaches to look for the purple portion of quahog clams, which are common along northeast shorelines. This stuff was and still is used to create wampum. Naturally wave-tumbled jewelry-grade pieces can be worth more than $10-20 a pound if you know what to look for. Raw full fragments are worth half that or less, but still good if fresh enough and thick enough to make beads out of. You can even sell whole shells as single or matched sets, restaurants will buy these to serve shellfish on, and collectors will buy large sets >4.75" if you keep the locality data.
Another idea for things in nature is selling minerals that come mixed in traprock under power lines. Many access roads are made of crushed volcanic basalt and that can contain things like jade, peridot, amethyst, etc. The payday, however, isn't in the type of minerals, as the rare stuff is rare, but the colors and patterns. Gather the ones with interesting colors and run them through a rock tumbler, that can yield about $5-$10 a pound. If you live in a part of the country blessed with lots of desireable minerals naturally, you don't need to farm power line roads...that's just the only easy source of these things in my area of the country.
...or you could just stack boxes at Walmart. A real second job is a lot less effort than any of these schemes, but I am so over-educated in such useless ways that stocking shelves or flipping burgers was never happening.
2. After writing all that, decreasing expenses is almost not worth going over. You'll cut everything that can be cut and it's probably not much savings. Most people who try come to the same realization as governments - you can't just cut your way to financial solvency. You have to raise revenue...or...
3. Stiff em! Disclaimer: The following is provided purely for entertainment and does not constitute legal advice. Always consult a lawyer for actual legal advice...
If you have low enough income, or your income comes from exempt sources, you are "judgment-proof" in practice and the laws on paper no longer matter - creditors can't collect a dime if they sue you to recover credit card debts. If you must screw credit card issuers, I've done it so I am not judging, read up on your rights, as it differs by state. If you meet the threshold for being judgment-proof, you can ignore their phone calls, although I would pick one of them up to explain that you are judgment-proof and going through extreme hardship. Then send a letter in writing to cease and desist contact, so they either have to sue or shut up as per FDCPA regulations. If they choose to sue, make them prove the debt is valid in court, waste their time and resources exercising your rights. The burden of proof falls on the moving party in small claims court. Watch them like a hawk and if they violate the FDCPA in any way, you can slap them with a countersuit for like $1,500 per violation. You can also ask the court to waive the filing fee using hardship as the reason.
In one of my cases, they had to prove the statute of limitations wasn't up, by including a phone transcript of me talking about hardship and exempt income, an own goal on their part. I "lost" that case, but I won...they didn't get a single penny. I also got the attorney general of my state to investigate their shady debt collection practices. I am so wonderfully toxic that the collector changed counsel and hasn't made a peep about this in years. Even though I now have the income to pay it, it's their burden so they must ask, I'm not obligated to lift a finger.
If you drag this process out long enough, some collectors will actually cancel the debt rather than keep waiting. I had over $2,000 abruptly cancelled even though I was getting ready to negotiate. I talk about all this like it's a fun game, but I do feel bad about what happened. If I'd known then what I know about credit now, all of it could have been prevented.
If you must stiff them, let the store cards charge-off first, assuming they are underwritten by Synchrony. Synch's business model is very forgiving. Same for Capital One. Don't let Amex, Chase, Citi charge-off, they can hold very long grudges. Ideally, nothing charges off, if you can keep making minimum payments obviously do that and focus larger payments to the cards you care about saving the most. Or, you could use the snowball or avalanche methods to systematically pay off cards by balance size or interest rate.
Don't worry about AA too much, if they balance chase you down, those limits can be recovered at some later date. I also wouldn't worry about not being able to get more loans, robbing Peter to pay Paul is not a real solution to this. You just need more income.
EX VS3: 746, EQ VS3: 757, TU VS3: 755, VS4: 705
